Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's Reception of Beethoven

This book analyses the lifelong impact of Beethoven's music on Wagner and its importance for his conception of music dra...

Author: Klaus Kropfinger

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This book analyses the lifelong impact of Beethoven's music on Wagner and its importance for his conception of music drama. Kropfinger charts Wagner's early responses to the composer and considers his experience as a conductor of Beethoven's music. In addition the book addresses Wagner's theory and practice of music drama, which he came to regard as the pre-ordained successor to the Beethovenian symphony. The author discusses this view in the context of the Ring cycle, as well as indicating in detail the ways in which Beethoven influenced Wagner both directly and indirectly.

WAGNER AND BEETHOVEN

WAGNER AND BEETHOVEN Richard Wagner's reception of Beethoven KLAUS KROPFINGER Translated by Peter Palmer

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne Sydney

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY IOOI I, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Originally published in German as Wagner und Beethoven by Gustav Bosse Verlag Regensburg 1974 and © Gustav Bosse Verlag Regensburg First published in English by Cambridge University Press 1991 as Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's reception of Beethoven

English translation © Cambridge University Press 1991 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge British Library cataloguing in publication data

Kropfinger, Klaus Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's reception of Beethoven. 1. Opera in German. Wagner, Richard, 1813-83 1. Title 11. Wagner und Beethoven. English 782.1092 Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Kropfinger, Klaus. [Wagner und Beethoven. English] Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's reception of Beethoven/ Klaus Kropfinger: translated by Peter Palmer. p. cm. Translation of: Wagner und Beethoven. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN o 521 34201 5 1. Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. 2. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1829. 1. Title. 782.1'092 — dc20 90-1505 CIP ISBN 0 521 34201 5

CONTENTS

Preface Additional acknowledgements German and English abbreviations

page ix x xi

1 Introduction Previous research Objectives

i 2 11

2 Wagner's experience of Beethoven The initial experience Stations and function of the Beethoven experience

14 14 30

3 The Romantic background and Beethoven biography The 'Romantic image of Beethoven' Wagner's knowledge of literature on Beethoven The projected Beethoven biography .

50 50 58 61

4 Beethoven's role in Wagner's writings on art Wagner as a writer Aspects of the exegesis of Beethoven Beethoven exegesis and the theory of the music drama

68 68 76 141

5 Wagner's theory and construction of music drama The theory Musical and dramatic construction

155 155 165,

6 Wagner as Beethoven's heir Wagner's philosophy of history The insubordination of history

243 243 247

Notes Bibliography Index of names Index of subjects

254 259 282 287

PREFACE

This is a revised version of a book first published in German in 1974. More than ever, I have tried to present Wagner's relationship to Beethoven with as little prejudice as possible. It is only away from the beaten track, removed from the aura of the Wagner myth, but also beyond scepticism cultivated for its own sake, that the labyrinthine structure of the wuvre becomes evident. Wagner's reception of Beethoven is part of that structure. It therefore needs examining in greater depth and breadth - but even so, this study can only be a partial one: 'drops from the Wagnerian ocean' (The Times Literary Supplement, 18 J u n e 1970).

I would like to thank all those who have encouraged and supported this undertaking for their advice and suggestions, as well as their kindness: Reinhold Brinkmann, Harvard; Carl Dahlhaus, Berlin; John Deathridge, Cambridge (UK); Werner Frohlich, Mainz; Martin Geek, Munich; Giinther Massenkeil, Bonn; Wilhelm Perpeet, Bonn; Emil Platen, Bonn; Joseph Schmidt-Gorg and Rudolf Stcphan, Berlin. For kindly providing working material and various references I thank Frau Gertrud Strobel, late of the Richard Wagner Archive, Bayreuth, and Dr Joachim Bergfeld of the Richard Wagner Memorial House in Bayreuth. I have also to thank the present director of the Richard Wagner Memorial House, Dr Franz Eger. I am particularly indebted to the Thyssen Foundation of Cologne for its support, without which neither the work nor the first publication would have been possible. In this connection I am also grateful to Dr Franz A. Stein of the Gustav Bosse Verlag, Regensburg. I owe the present English edition to the generous co-operation of the Cambridge University Press; the help and sympathy of its music books editor, Penny Souster; the friendly mediation of John Deathridge; and the perceptive translation by Peter Palmer. I cordially thank Helga von Kiigelgen and Volker Schierk, who have always been vigilant critics.

ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following English translations are quoted in this text, or have been consulted in its preparation: Adorno, Theodor, 1981. In Search of Wagner, transl. by Rodney Livingstone, London (New Left Books) Berlioz, H., 1969. Memoirs, transl. by David Cairns, London (Gollancz) Bujic, B. (ed.), 1988. Music in European Thought i8§i-igi2 (includes extracts from Hanslick's The Beautiful in Music and Wagner's Opera and Drama and Beethoven, transl. by Martin Cooper), Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) Dahlhaus, Carl, 1982. Esthetics of Music, transl. by William Austin, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) Kolodin, I. (ed.), 1962. The Composer as Listener (includes extract from Wagner's A Pilgrimage to Beethoven), New York (Horizon Press/Collier Books) Mann, Thomas, 1985. Pro and Contra Wagner, transl. by Allan Blunden, London (Faber & Faber) Schopenhauer, A., 1974. Parerga and Paralipomena II, transl. by E. F. J. Payne, Oxford (Oxford University Press) Wagner, Cosima, 1978/80. Diaries I and II, edited by M. Gregor-Dellin and D. Mack, transl. by Geoffrey Skelton, London (Collins) Wagner, Richard, 1983. My Life, ed. by M. Whittall, transl. by Andrew Gray, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 1987. Selected Letters of RW, ed. by B. Millington, transl. by Stewart Spencer, London (Dent) 1980. The Diary of RW 1865-1882: The Brown Book, transl. by George Bird, London (Gollancz) 1979. Three Wagner Essays, transl. by Robert L.Jacobs, London (Eulenburg Books) 1973. Wagner Writes from Paris ... Stories, Essays and Articles by the Young

Composer, cd. and transl. by R. L. Jacobs and G. Skelton, London (George Allen & Unwin)

GERMAN AND ENGLISH ABBREVIATIONS

BAMZ Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung BLW Kb'nig Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner. Briefwechsel, in 5 vols. ed. by Otto Strobel (Karlsruhe, 1936-9) GS R. Wagner, Gesammelle Schriften und Dichlungen, 12 vols. (Leipzig, MGG NZJM SB

WWV CW MET ML NGW SL TWE WP

1907) Die Musik in Geschichle und Gegenwart, 14 ( + 2) vols., ed. by Friedrich Blume (Kassel, 1949-68, 1973-9) Neue Zeilschrift fur Musik R. Wagner, Sdmtliche Briefe, ed. by Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf, Vol. I: 1830-42 (Leipzig, 1967); Vol. II: 1842-9 (Leipzig, •97o) Wagner- Werkverzeichnis C. Wagner, Diaries I and II (London, 1978-80) Music in European Thought i8$i-igi2, ed. by B. Bujic (Cambridge, 1988) R. Wagner, My Life (Cambridge, 1983) John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner (London, 1984) Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (London, 1987) Three Wagner Essays (London, 1979) Wagner Writes from Paris ... Stories, Essays and Articles by the Young Composer (London, 1973)

INTRODUCTION

In 1869 Wagner successfully requested a copy of Waldmiiller's portrait of Beethoven, which was owned by the publishers Breitkopf & Hartel. This was not the only Beethoven portrait that Wagner possessed. For in December 1851, when he wanted a portrait of Liszt, he said that 'so far I have only Beethoven on my wall, apart from the Nibelung sheet by Cornelius' (SB, iv, p. 221). Since his teens, in fact, Wagner had been familiar with Beethoven's outward appearance: in My Life (p. 30) he mentions the impression which 'Beethoven's physiognomy, as shown by lithographs of the time' had made on him in 1827. The composer's image accompanied Wagner throughout his life, symbolizing his persistent attempts to comprehend the spiritual phenomenon that was Beethoven, to capture his likeness as both man and artist. What, then, did Beethoven look like to Wagner? Wagner's mental image of Beethoven is an integral part of that myth of himself, or persona, at which he worked all his life and which he handed on to posterity as something binding and sacrosanct. Both during his lifetime and later on, Wagner's staunch admirers took pains to conserve this 'self-portrait', including those Beethovenian features to which it owes a great deal. The dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerite has always tended to accept statements by Wagner without stopping to consider the background, the context in which they were made. One illustration of this is the way Curt von Westernhagen interprets Wagner's request for a true and not an ideal picture of Beethoven. As Wagner's correspondence with Breitkopf & Hartel and with Robert Krausse, the copyist, shows, it was what made him choose Waldmiiller's portrait. Beethoven was to be depicted 'free from any affectation'. But did Wagner actually see in the desired portrait simply the 'real man', i.e. his immediate outward appearance? Among the portraits painted of Beethoven, Waldmiiller's was one of the most suspect and heavily criticized. Wagner knew that, because Breitkopf & Hartel pointed it out to him. No doubt he also knew Schindler's account of the circumstances in which the portrait was produced, and knew how harshly he had judged Waldmiiller's labours. Interestingly enough, Wagner rejected this opinion in favour of one which would gain currency at a later period. Unlike Schindler, Theodor Frimmel thought that Wald-


miiller's Beethoven portrait managed to reawaken a mental image of the Beethoven of the twenties. And Bruno Grimschitz remarks in his study of the painter (1957) that he was capable of memorizing individual characteristics exceptionally quickly. Waldmuller's portrait with the 'hearing eyes' is, he believes, 'one of the best portraits of the great tone-poet'. Wagner evidently saw in this picture of the 'real man' some quite specific features which he found important. They belong, says Joseph SchmidtGorg in MGG, to a composer already scarred by worry and illness, and above all one who was hard of hearing. The 'hearing eyes' are a sign that his ears were attuned to the sounds within him. Thus in the 'true picture' he wanted, Wagner could see once again the features of the Beethoven he had described in his Beethoven essay. This was the composer with 'the vision of an innermost musical world to proclaim' (GS, ix, p. 83); the musician who, 'being afflicted by deafness, is now undisturbed by life's noises and listens solely to the harmonies within him' (GS, ix, p. 92). The composer as a saint and a redeemer- that was Wagner's contribution to the Romantic image of Beethoven. So behind his apparently straightforward request there lies a specific perception of Beethoven. And it affects Wagner's own myth, too, because his image of 'Beethoven the redeemer is simply an allegory of Wagner the redeemer' (A. Schmitz 1926, p. 183).

Previous research Although the literature on Wagner has swollen to vast proportions, it does not include many studies that deal in a critical way with the Wagner myth as it relates to the myth of Beethoven. Moreover, the majority of such studies are concerned with individual topics. Only Karl Ipser's Beethoven Wagner - Bayreulh (1953) examines Wagner's reception of Beethoven comprehensively, and as a self-contained subject. (Wyzewa's Beethoven et Wagner,firstpublished in 1898, deals with other matters.) It was Ipser's aim to present Wagner's life as 'a life with Beethoven' not just with the aid of facts and figures, but by postulating the existence of an 'innermost active force'. But his book falls short in this respect: there are long passages comprising merely a stream of facts and quotations. Like the uncritical Wagnerite, Ipser treats his data as symbols with an obvious meaning and function that stand in no need of analysis or criticism. What point is there in his saying, for instance, that Beethoven was born in the same year as Wagner's father? This, to Ipser, is a 'significant conjunction' and no coincidence. As to Wagner's Faust Overture, he finds it significant that Beethoven too had planned to set 'Faust' to music. A little farther on he quotes the enthusiastic conclusion to an essay about Wagner's overture, which hailed him as one of 'the few legitimate heirs and successors to Beethoven, the son of the god of music incarnate'. But Ipser never acknowledges Hans von Biilow as the author, and this typifies his liberal

INTRODUCTION

and nonchalant use of other writers' ideas and work on the subject of Wagner and Beethoven. In addition to acknowledged quotations, the book includes whole chunks of unidentified 'literary extracts'. (The late Gertrud Strobel has kindly identified Lorenz's Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner and Engelsmann's Wagners klingendes Universum as /two of the sources.) Ipscr also uses his sources uncritically in various respects. In the first, 1907 volume of his Beethoven biography, Max Koch wrote that Wagner 'was able to hear' Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on three occasions; Ipscr presents this as an established fact. And Koch wrongly stated that Wagner had copied out the score of Beethoven's Ninth in Paris. This leads Ipser into claiming that Wagner made 'a fresh copy of the score', which has since been lost. There are many more such errors to illustrate the superficiality of Ipser's approach. The motto of the 'Wesendonck' Sonata, 'Wisst ihr wie das wird', is described as the Norns' question in Walkure. Lchrs, instead of Anders, is named as the person to whom Schindler-after an exchange in which Wagner took part - guaranteed to make amends for having criticized him. The significance of this episode is not explained, although a little earlier, Ipser mentions the Beethoven biography on which Wagner and Anders planned to collaborate. Jean Boycr gives considerable space to Wagner's reception of Beethoven in his book Le 'Romantisme' de Beethoven (1938). He outlines the formation and development of the 'Romantic' Beethoven legend and looks at Wagner so thoroughly that this section of his book could be described as an internal monograph. Drawing on Wagner's performance of the Ninth Symphony as well as his writings, Boyer examines Wagner's view of Beethoven chronologically. He particularly stresses the fact that Wagner saw in Beethoven a forerunner of music drama. This idea, he says, was derived from E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose interpretation of Beethoven influenced Wagner's for a long time, until eventually Schopenhauer's influence made itself felt in the Beethoven essay. But Boyer also discerns Romantic precursors, especially Novalis and Wackenroder, in major aspects of Schopenhauer's thought. Boyer's survey is broad and richly faceted, while at the same time containing points that call for criticism and debate. What is most open to question is the way he deals with Wagner's concept of music. It is a moot point whether, in A Happy Evening, Wagner already takes the view that Beethoven's conception of certain works began with a poetic idea, and that this determined his musical themes. Equally debatable is the claim that in Beethoven, Wagner is conforming to Schopenhauer in representing the 'absolute' musician's standpoint. Besides examining what Wagner meant by 'absolute music', we need to explain how he visualized Beethoven's 'idea', and what actively inspired it. Boyer also makes us examine Wagner's interpretation of the Ninth Symphony in greater detail, since this is so closely bound up with the way he experienced Beethoven. Another major contributor to the subject of Wagner's Beethoven


reception is Herbert Birtner with his treatise Zur Deulschen BeethovenAuffassung sell Richard Wagner (1937). Birtner uses the Ninth Symphony to trace the evolution of Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven. He makes the important point that Wagner's experience of Weber's music prepared him for his responses to Beethoven, although it is debatable whether Beethoven was then just 'another object of "enthusiastic veneration" besides Weber and Mozart'. Another valuable comment he makes is that it was only slowly and gradually that Wagner put his personal image of Beethoven to creative, practical use. Here we have some further starting-points for a more intensive study of Wagner's Beethoven experience and its function in his output. Arnold Schmitz has written a number of works that deal with Beethoven and Wagner. Each is an attempt to explore the interplay between the myths of Wagner and Beethoven respectively. The first, basic work is Die Beethoven-Apotheose als Beispiel eines Sakularisierungsvorganges (1926). Schmitz

renewed his efforts in Das Romantische Beethovenbild (1927), which probably blazed a trail for Boyer's study. His essay Der Mythos der Kunst in den Schriften Richard Wagners (1947-50) concentrates on specific features of a development that is linked to the history of ideas. Schmitz offers some illuminating remarks on the 'myth-making technique'. He traces Wagner's 'myth of art' through the composer's writings from the Zurich period to the last years. Schmitz shows how the Beethoven myth - the idea of a 'saint' who embodies man's natural goodness — comes into Wagner's 'art myth', by virtue of the claim that he was going to redeem religion with art's assistance. This amounts to a fusion, within Wagner's own myth of art, of the Wagner myth and the Beethoven myth. Schmitz's studies are an inducement to examine other myths and legends accruing from Wagner's reception of Beethoven, and to observe how they fit in with Wagner's self-portrait. This we shall do in our next two chapters. Of the objective, critical studies that exist of Wagner and his relationship to Beethoven, Guido Adler's Wagner lectures from the start of the century are the earliest. What is the significance of these lectures? The answer is that they probably represent the first major attempt to grasp Wagner as one phenomenon among others - all of which have equal claims on our attention in an historical context. They challenged the thesis that Wagner's music drama formed the climax to an inevitable development, Beethoven's works constituting a preliminary step. It was also Adler who noted the crucial difference between the invention and treatment of music drama's vocal motifs on the one hand, and purely instrumental motifs on the other. In so doing, Adler provided the basic tools for later research. Ernest Newman's writings are equally enlightening, especially Wagner as Man and Artist, although from the critical viewpoint there is less emphasis on Wagner's relationship to Beethoven. Newman points out some major discrepancies between Wagner's theories and his practice. This is the basic

INTRODUCTION

reason why opinions differ so strongly on Wagner's compositional debt to Beethoven, and on the extent to which their techniques can be related and compared, if at all. Such commentators as Walter Engelsmann and Theodor W. Adorno are diametrically opposed in their views on this subject, just as myth and anti-myth are poles apart. Like Engelsmann, Alfred Lorenz represents the orthodox school of Wagner commentators, except that he tries to demonstrate the music drama's absorption of the Becthovenian symphony by means of a special analytical device: the Bar form. At the end of his treatise Worauf beruhl die bekannte Wirkung der Durchjuhrung im I. Eroicasatz (1924), Lorenz writes as follows: The forms piled one upon the other which I have found in Wagner's music drama are rooted not in the type of opera that went before it but in the Beethoven symphony, thus confirming the truth of Wagner's claim that the symphony had poured into his drama. (p. 183) Two objections can be raised to this statement. First, studies by Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan have since undermined it by illustrating the inadequacy of the formal patterns Lorenz applied to Wagner's music drama: the Bar ('strophe'), the Bogen ('arch') and so on. Secondly, even if we apply it to the development section of Beethoven's 'Eroica', the Bar form (or rather the scheme of the Reprisenbar) does not make sense. In fact it contradicts something that Lorenz himself said. Unlike others, he regarded the close of the development not as 'signalling a victory' but as a 'period of exhaustion' which, he maintained, pointed beyond the development's confines. We may question the correctness of referring to a victory or defeat of the principal theme, but that is not now the point. What is evident is that, having perceived the development's forward impetus, Lorenz subsequently loses sight of it by imposing the Reprisenbar on the procedure. For the concept of the Reprisenbar implies a 'return of the same thing' [ Wiederkehr des Gleictien], which is precisely what Beethoven avoids in his developments. To adapt Rudolf Stephan's remark on the schematic character of Lorenz's Wagner analyses, Lorenz does away with all that is best about Beethoven's music, 'its dynamic force, its ceaseless animation'. Lorenz's Beethoven analysis poses two inescapable questions. One is the question of Wagner's own attitude to the dynamic element in Beethoven's music; and, closely connected with this, there is the question of how Wagner viewed the 'reprise'. What is the relationship between Wagner's music drama and the compositions of Beethoven? What sources can we consult on this subject? We shall return to these issues in Chapters 4 and 5. Otto Daube has tried to give some constructive answers to the above questions in Richard Wagner. 'Ich schreibe keine Symphonien mehr' (i960).

Daube's main aim was to set forth the sources for Wagner's period of study with Weinlig, but also for the 'actual studies', covering not just Wagner's


'brief half-year' with Weinlig but the whole period from 1828 to the end of 1832. In the NGW, however, John Deathridge points out not only that Weinlig evidently taught Wagner over a longer period of time, but also that these lessons may have included classical sonata form as well as studies in counterpoint. Otto Daube's book may be said to hinge on the publication of Wagner's counterpoint studies under Weinlig, together with the previously unpublished Piano Sonata in A major. But on closer scrutiny it is difficult to grant Daube's work as a whole the status of a source-book, because large parts of it are littered with extremely subjective interpretations. Daube avowedly intended them as starting-points for a new and thorough account for the Wagnerian work of art's 'musical anatomy', but they should not go unchallenged. Thus he cites Nietzsche when discussing 'formal parallels' between the symphony and drama, although in the end he rejects Nietzsche - and Thomas Mann and Adorno as well - as an interpretative point of departure. The parallel drawn between cyclical form in the symphony and the Ring cycle is arbitrary and totally unfounded: Daube never provides any 'sources'. The same goes for his demonstration of a formal correspondence between the Ninth Symphony and the 'formal miracle of Meistersinger and Parsifal', where he invokes Alfred Lorenz. A question-mark even hangs over Daube's source-material with regard to the Sonata in A major. Wagner cut the fugato section that originally formed part of the finale, as can be seen from Carl Dahlhaus's edition of the piano music. Daube's edition reproduces the section in full, without comment. His thoughts on this interesting matter are limited to a footnote which dismisses vital details of the sources as negligible. It is up to us to ask if speculation about the reasons for such cuts would truly lead nowhere. Max Fehr published the two volumes of his Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeil in 1934 and 1954 respectively. They have always been essential reading for students of Wagner's reception of Beethoven. The years Wagner spent as an exile in Zurich and Tribschen had an important bearing on his development and on the exact nature of his relationship to Beethoven. Fehr records them from the viewpoint of his activities as a conductor of Beethoven's orchestral music, and as a 'coach' at rehearsals of his string quartets. Probably the most ambitious recent Wagner book with a close bearing on the present study was published by Egon Voss in 1977, two years after the first (German) edition of Wagner and Beethoven. Voss's book is titled Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik. Wagners symphonischer Ehrgeiz.. Voss

has worked as an editor on the Wagner Gesamtausgabe, and his book draws extensively on that experience. That fact in itself would suffice to make it interesting. The book's special immediacy is however derived from its central critical point of departure, namely a revaluation and reinterpretation of Wagner as a composer, particularly of instrumental works. Voss has carried a stage further the process of demythologization to which the

INTRODUCTION

present study was and still is devoted. He attempts to show how Wagner directed his creative efforts - more or less covertly or knowingly - towards instrumental, i.e. symphonic, music, but also towards symphonic drama, a drama seen as being primarily musical in orientation. Thus Wagner's 'symphonic ambition' [Ekrgeiz] serves as a vantage-point from which to look down on a bare stage. The actors have all removed their masks, and the scenery swings to one side or becomes transparent, affording a glimpse of what lies behind it. This idea has a certain attractiveness, and it seems quite feasible for Wagner's few instrumental compositions to fit in with it. But when we examine this idea more closely, it proves to be fraught with problems. The very phrase 'symphonic ambition' invites contradiction, and here we can quote Thomas Mann: But in any case the insinuation of ambition in any normal worldly sense can be dismissed for the simple reason that Wagner was working initially without any hope or prospect of making an immediate impact, which actual circumstances and conditions would not allow - working in a vacuum of his own invention, towards an imaginary, ideal theatre that could not possibly be realized for the present. There is certainly no hint of cool calculation or the ambitious exploitation of existing opportunities in words such as these, addressed to Otto Wesendonck: 'For I see clearly that I am fully myself only when I create...' (Pro and Contra Wagner, p. 139)

'Ambition' suggests something external; Thomas Mann's critique delves to the heart of the matter. But if it is still insisted that Wagner had this ambition, then was it not from a false, improper motive that he turned to writing instrumental works from time to time? By a kind of'double strategy', it might be argued, Wagner- because he was very aware of his limitations as a purely instrumental composer ultimately 'slaked' his symphonic ambitions in his music dramas, the latter being 'symphonic dramas'. But this is not the case. Either Wagner was an instrumental fanatic with some kind of secret compulsion to identify himself with the symphony, and was not at all averse to writing any more symphonies, or else his music dramas were the result of a genuine artistic decision, a logical departure as a composer from the instrumental medium of the symphony and from any ambition to write in a genuinely 'symphonic' manner, albeit in the form of'music dramas'. These propositions cannot both be true. And it is possible to show that Wagner's instrumental works are glosses, experiments and leftovers, and that it is the music dramas which represent his real creative output. It was a musico-dramatic output, not a primarily instrumental one, not one that was the result of'symphonic ambition'. Dahlhaus describes the instrumental works as mere parerga in The New Grove Wagner.

If we want to characterize Wagner at all accurately, the only concept which seems tofitis 'intention'. By this we mean first and foremost the 7


unflagging concentration of all one's intellectual and imaginative powers on a single artistic goal. But there is also an 'intention' in respect of the artistic objects. In both structure and 'content', or mythical subjectmatter, these supremely imaginative products have that 'intentional objectivity' which clearly distinguishes them from any of the products of 'ambition'. Ingarden, in his Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt (1965), writes that the 'activity of creating an intentional object' consists of actions 'which tend to make permanent, to "fix" in some way the purely intentional objects created therein, and this is achieved by giving these objects some existentially stronger ontological basis that will enable them to outlast the actions which produced them. They will thus become detached from the purely subjective foundation in which they originated and acquire an intersubjective objectivity' (11/1, pp. 204-5). Such 'permanence' necessarily entails a complete design for the 'intended work'. But the majority of Wagner's symphonic or purely instrumental works - including his late 'symphonic sketches' - lack this for the simple reason that he never completed them. We find a major discrepancy between Wagner's avowed (but temporary!) aims as a composer and his non-realization of symphonic pieces as 'intentional objects'. There are, however, distinctions to be made here. It would surely be wrong to regard the purely instrumental side of Wagner's creative output as a single entity. Rather it reflects creative impulses arising from a given situation as man and artist: impulses which take various forms because there were different motives behind them. It seems fair to assume that at the start of Wagner's artistic development, the early instrumental works left him the option of being a purely instrumental composer, but that he very soon chose a different path. And via opera, this eventually led him to music drama. Thus viewed, Wagner's symphonic forays and excursions will come to represent transitory impulses arising out of the particular circumstances of his life and artistic career. Pierre Boulez has summed up the composer's relationship to tradition in the words: 'It can thus be said that a composer does not have a hard-and-fast attitude to tradition; rather his responses are conditioned by his evolution and depend on the current state of his creative development' (Melos 27 [i960], p. 294). This holds good for Wagner's relationship to purely instrumental music, and especially the symphony, as a traditional genre. According to Voss, Wagner's claim that the symphony had evolved into drama was not a true reflection of his views. Instead it reflected his desire to present music drama as a legitimate genre and for it to be acknowledged as such - which would eventually evoke one element in the notorious 'Bayreuth ideology'. This judgment is far too sweeping. Granted, Wagner himself pointed to a whole series of differences (central ones at that) between the symphony and music drama. They include the elimination -

INTRODUCTION

or the redesigning or redeployment - of the reprise; the different design, configurations and development of themes; the harmonic progressions; and the individual structure and form. But looking at it through Wagner's eyes, there are certainly elements in the way he developed his motifs and melodies, for example, that indicate a connection between the symphony and drama. At bottom, however, it was Wagner's broad artistic intention which engendered music drama instead of instrumental works, even though it had had its beginnings in instrumental and operatic pieces, and had passed through several stages of opera composing. Voss maintains that almost throughout his life, it was Wagner's ambition to become a great and significant symphonist, or at least to compose significant and universally recognized symphonic music. This now seems an exaggeration. Wagner's subsequent efforts in the symphonic realm were more extensive but did not last; after that, there were only sporadic excursions. He cherished no secret yet central, lifelong desire in that respect. Whatever the content and objective by which it is defined, his so-called symphonic ambition was altogether a by-product of his artistic development. If Wagner had really nurtured far-reaching symphonic aims, he would not have cast aside the Faust Overture, which he originally conceived as a symphony in Paris in 1839. The thematic sketches and compositional fragments that Voss goes out of his way to enumerate would not have remained mere statements of intent. And towards the end of his life, Wagner would have done more than just talk about future symphonies. He would have actually realized one or other of his initial themes rather than carry on with and complete his final stage-work, Parsifal. After arriving at music drama, Wagner was still driven to the brink of instrumental music time and again. This was for reasons which affected him deeply and were also a provocation. These causes were, however, 'adjusted' very quickly within the music drama's ambit. They included Berlioz (and Beethoven!) in Paris, the symphonic poems of Liszt, those two dogged symphonists Mendelssohn and Schumann, but above all Brahms and - Bruckner. Instrumental music not only survived in the shadow of music drama but even acquired a fresh impetus. This impressed Wagner considerably, and he felt it as a challenge; again and again, however, it was also of instant fascination, for all his woolly anti-Semitism and his fixed art-ideology. The fact is graphically illustrated by Cosima Wagner's diaries, which mention Mendelssohn as an orchestral composer surprisingly often, and not always negatively. In the light of Mendelssohn's unerring skill as a purely instrumental composer, Wagner said such things as 'Mendelssohn would raise his hands in horror if he ever saw me composing' (23 June 1871). Statements like this may be tinged with irony, but the real feelings behind them are complex. They explain why Wagner thought it so important to have at least one entire symphony to his credit in later life, even if it was only the early one in C major. He had once entrusted


the score of that very work to Mendelssohn, and he never forgave him for its disappearance! We can now also understand why, in the end, Wagner wanted to have nothing more to do with the 'Wesendonck' Sonata. Contemporaries of his were casting their 'infinite symphonic shadow'. Do we really wish to embarrass Wagner by puffing up this sketch as a kind of magnum opus of his 'symphonic ambition'? The piece is marginal to a very different order of music that was going through the forward-looking composer's mind. Gutman quite rightly calls it shallow. The 'Wesendonck' Sonata was produced in a specific set of circumstances relating to Wagner's life and career. It stands on the threshold of the composition of the Ring. But this is no pointer to music drama as the consummation of the symphony. After all, it was Wagner's aim as a musical dramatist to transpose purely instrumental music into a new - and 'essential' [eigentlich] - musical dimension once and for all by giving it dramatic significance. Cosima records Wagner as saying (16 August 1869) that in him, the accent lay on the conjunction of the dramatic poet with the musician; he would not amount to much purely as a musician. Is the idea to unmask this too as a piece of self-ideologizing? The thesis of Wagner's 'symphonic ambition' appears to be a fresh attempt to solve the problem of how his creative work should really be understood and classified. And it corresponds to the attempt to subsume Wagner's output under the 'idea of absolute music' (Carl Dahlhaus). The notion of assigning Wagner to the realm of absolute music is crucial to numerous studies published by Dahlhaus. It also appears in his extensive contribution to The New Grove Wagner, and it undoubtedly has its attractions. There may have indeed been an idea of absolute music lasting from early Romanticism to Wagner and beyond. But if so, we need to ask if, as the result of a change in the musical material, in formal, structural and expressive qualities during the nineteenth century, the content and concept of this idea did not undergo some changes as well. The problem clearly emerges where analysis, by using purely musical categories of form, only partially succeeds in grasping the structure of music drama. This leads on to the question of Wagner's concept of music. Was it really that of an instrumental music which fitted into a purely musical structural and expressive framework, and with which the symphonic drama also fell into line? Wagner's view of Beethoven can help to enlighten us on this very point. For his reception of the Beethoven symphonies, and also of the other instrumental works, represents a crossroads. Not only does it give a fair picture of the way he summed up Beethoven's instrumental music; it also serves to bring out more clearly the structure of his own range as a composer of music dramas. The one left its mark on the other. We now come to a matter which looms large both in Voss's book and in 10

INTRODUCTION

the biographical section of The New Grove Wagner, which was written by John Deathridge. Establishing the biographical truth is beset with problems. There can be no doubt that Wagner's autobiographical details contain inaccuracies ranging from the inadvertent error to deliberate fabrication. A number of Wagner scholars involved with the Gesamlausgabe have pursued this matter further. Their joint findings appear in the Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis published in 1986. For such a strategy, a flair for detective work is constantly needed. There are times, however, when it also resorts to an overdose of scepticism and to distortions that are based on mere hypotheses. Important though this work is, we should always remember that with Wagner we are dealing de facto with two levels of biographical truth. Time and again, as an interpreter, Wagner reshaped his life and artistic development. This fact, and the appropriate response to it, surely carries as much weight as the revelation of things 'as they really were' (or could have been). One point is particularly significant. Wagner began to interpret events not after they were over, and from an autobiographical perspective, but so soon as to determine the biographical facts themselves, i.e. that which constitutes the 'actual truth'. This lends weight to what Dahlhaus writes at the end of the chapter in The New Grove Wagner headed 'Letters, diaries, autobiography': Understanding the paths along which Wagner's imagination set off is more important than correcting conscious or unconscious inaccuracies. Yet editorial meticulousness is not to be despised: it is only against the background of empirical truth that the 'poetic truth' can be recognized for what it is - another truth and not a distortion that the exegete is at liberty to dismiss. It will be essential to take this attitude when it comes to Wagner's autobiographical account of his experience of Beethoven. And in reflecting on the lifelong spell which Beethoven's music exerted on him, and his reactions to it, Wagner was confirming and interpreting his own personality. Objectives Any study of Wagner's reception of Beethoven must begin with the source-material. It follows from what has been stated above, however, that the sources should be seen in a wider context. Obviously what rates as a source is chiefly anything that Wagner wrote or said which is directly or indirectly connected with his view of Beethoven. But these statements need to be examined critically, as do the supporting documents that occasionally have to be consulted - press reports and the statements of friends and contemporaries. The use made so far of what Wagner said about his earliest encounter with Beethoven has been wholly uncritical; at best it includes a note on 'poetic licence'. Yet if Wagner's various autobiographi11


cal statements are compared, it is impossible to ignore the discrepancies between them. Autobiography, for Wagner, was a means of selfexamination throughout his life. Thus the question of his 'Beethoven experience' is bound up with the question of his autobiographical method. As a follow-up to Wagner's earliest experience of Beethoven, we must look into the profound later impressions that Beethoven's music made on him. This has been considered by a number of previous writers. But have they covered every level and aspect of the experience, and have they comprehended its function? Here again the number of sources is appreciable, but we must also consider the particular situation in which Wagner received his impression and reacted to it. The same goes for his writings on artistic topics. Whom was he addressing, and what private and public circles did he have in mind at the time? Certainly any assessment of all Wagner's remarks on Beethoven must rest on a study of the material ranging from internal textual criticismto a careful exploration of possible 'influences'. Attention must also be paid to Wagner's language. The meaning of individual words aside, insights can be gleaned from Wagner's habit of using a fixed terminology for some very specific musical matters, but not for others. Any study of extracts from Wagner's writings will confirm that Wagner poses problems as an author. From the viewpoint of his reception of Beethoven, however, it will especially point up the ticklish relationship between his theory and his poetic-dramatic compositions. Up to now Theodor Uhlig's writings have been completely overlooked in this context. Although it was thought that they merely echoed Wagner's, they do in fact add significantly to what he said. There can be no doubt that Wagner's achievements as a composer far exceed what he achieved as an author. But in assessing the relationship between the two, there is a need to distinguish between the intrinsic merit of Wagner's writings and their interpretative role. Dahlhaus states that the works are the key to the writings, not vice versa. Were this always the case, however, Wolzogen's leitmotif catalogue would still have the importance it used to, and Wolzogen completely fails to do justice to the structural function - i.e. the connective dimension - of Wagner's leitmotifs. Part III of Wagner's Opera and Drama is essential reading if we are not to misconstrue his leitmotif as being simply a motif of reminiscence (and there are people who still do this). Opera and Drama helps us grasp the point that the leitmotif actualizes a reminiscence and a presentiment at one and the same time. Wagner's writings are in need of interpretation themselves, but they also assist interpretation, despite all the difficulties. They are not wildly at odds with the compositions of Wagner. Rather they mediate between works and artistic domains, as Opera and Drama does. Originally it was the present writer's aim to examine the overall subject 12

INTRODUCTION

of Wagner's reception of Beethoven. In the course of our researches, however, certain focal points emerged and began to form a whole in themselves. Starting with the autobiographical sources, it then became our objective to observe and describe the core of Wagner's Beethoven experience - its structure and interweaving with the biography - as much as its scope, its roots from the standpoint of reception history and grounding in the 'Romantic image of Beethoven'. The obvious next step was to investigate Beethoven and his works as factors in Wagner's writings on art and in his dramas. Bearing in mind the awkward relationship between Wagner's theory and practice as a composer of music dramas, we made it our aim to explore and sift (at any rate partially) those traces of his understanding of Beethoven that were preserved in his musico-dramatic output. His activities as a conductor and 'arranger' of Beethoven's music were considered only inasmuch as they form an intrinsic part of this cluster of focal points. Although this study deals with Wagner's reception of Beethoven, his diverse relations to other composers should not be dismissed as insignificant. After all, he himself often spoke of his links with others. Especially in his youth, he said, he owed much to Mozart but above all Weber and, later on, Marschner and Spontini, not to mention Liszt. And even the acquaintance with Meyerbeer's grand opera and the example of Mendelssohn had some effect on him. The reasons for our particular choice of subject are, however, the experience of Beethoven that permeates Wagner's whole life, his almost constant thinking about Beethoven and, not least, his veneration of the composer as evidenced by his works.

'3

WAGNER'S EXPERIENCE OF BEETHOVEN

The initial experience Autobiographical sources

It is one of the truisms of Wagner research that particular caution is advisable with regard to the autobiographical writings and jottings. That goes not least for My Life. Nobody would disagree with Otto Strobel that the composer of the Ring, Tristan and Parsifal chose to view certain experiences in a different light from when they were recent and fresh in his mind. Wagner's letters contradict or amend many details in My Life (and as far as facts are concerned, the letters tend to be more reliable than Wagner's other writings).1 A full-scale critical study of the way Wagner depicted himself has yet to be written. But research undertaken in connection with the Complete Edition has yielded some important new findings - although some of these, in their turn, have given rise to fresh problems. Recently a start was made on a new edition of Wagner's letters, containing all the available texts. Cosima's diaries, beginning in January 1869 and ending in January 1883, are an important source which Wagner visualized as a sequel to My Life. (The latter is directly followed by his Annals: brief, lapidary jottings which go up to the end of 1868.) Cosima's diaries were inaccessible to the public until 1972 under the terms of a will; since their publication they have proved to be very helpful to researchers. Almost inevitably some things are repeated, and there are major difficulties in connection with a textual critique of the originals. But the significance of the diaries is immense. This applies to every aspect of Wagner's reception of Beethoven, including his earliest encounter with the composer. We shall now examine this experience, drawing on a number of statements by Wagner which do not always tally with each other. At the same time we shall endeavour to throw more light on the function of the autobiographical writings and their value as sources, but also on the problems of interpreting them. Wagner recorded his earliest experience of Beethoven seven times in all. It appears in the following writings, listed in chronological order: Red Pocket-Book (begun around mid-August 1835) 14

WAGNER S EXPERIENCE OF BEETHOVEN

A Pilgrimage to Beethoven (novella, Paris 1840) Autobiographical Sketch (1842-3) A Communication to My Friends (written in Zurich, 1851) 'Music of the Future' (written in Paris, i860) My Life (autobiography, begun 17 July 1865, finished May 1880) The Work and Mission of my Life (original title; 1879)2 The above texts differ on the following points: (i)

the number and the description of works by Beethoven that were crucial to the experience; (ii) the time, or commencement, of the experience, and, closely connected with this, (iii) the starting-point or cause of the actual experience or its development; (iv) the descriptive mode: some accounts present a composite experience, combining a number of elements and describing an intrinsically graduated, lengthier process. In the earliest source, the Red Pocket-Book, Wagner was still particularly close in time and content to the events under review. Significantly, he speaks of just 'Beethoven's symphonies' in general as inspiring a new passion for music in him. Apparently it was not one particular concert but several experiences, several visits to concerts, that fired the youngster's enthusiasm. We are pointing this out because in two more sources (A Communication and The Work and Mission) Wagner recalls the impression made by 'Beethoven's symphonies'. And where he refers, even less specifically, to Beethoven's 'music' (in the Sketch and 'Music of the Future'), we will at once think of several experiences. This raises the question of whether Wagner's references to just one symphony (A Pilgrimage, My Life) represent a stylization of the original experience, undertaken for a definite purpose, under the influence of certain surrounding factors or a fresh experience of Beethoven. How does the above affect an assessment of A Pilgrimage? The most obvious answer would be that Wagner was offering a poetically motivated stylization of the truth, one closely linked to his fictional treatment of his material. But there is more to it than that. It is no accident that the element of stylization appears in that novella, which can be seen as the first expression of Wagner's Beethoven worship. The story tells of a pilgrimage to music's holy of holies, and at its climax the master initiates his disciple into the secrets of his art. Arnold Schmitz sees in this a prefiguration of Wagner's later image of Beethoven, where the latter resembles a saint. Indeed with his Beethoven novella, Wagner took the first step towards consciously fashioning his own myth, his self-image. The artistic enthusiasm attached to the experience was thereby elevated to the status of '5


something unique. Only now did Wagner's first experience of Beethoven achieve that moment of illumination which has always been a talking-point in discussions of Wagner. It was the rehearsals and/or the performance of the Ninth Symphony under Habeneck which led Wagner back to Beethoven. (Thus A Pilgrimage does not just reflect Wagner's Gewandhaus experience, as Guido Adler assumed.) In all likelihood this was the immediate cause of the modifications he made to his own initial source. The original impression, now long past and already growing hazy, became transposed with the immediate experience provided by Beethoven's Ninth, which was the symphony. The old experience was returning on a new qualitative plane, so to speak: it marks a rediscovery of Beethoven. It already suggests something of that quest for the past which increasingly drove Wagner to look back on his life, explaining and revising it. Out of this came new 'editions' of his life and experiences. In My Life Wagner is more specific as regards what he wrote in the Pocket-Book and names the work that made such an indelible impression on him. Ernest Newman has augmented Wagner's statement by saying that it was on 17 January 1828 that he must have heard Beethoven's Symphony in A major. What prompted Wagner to underline this biographical detail, the fact that he had heard the Seventh Symphony? No doubt his first concern was to make the biographical facts in My Life as complete as he could fuller than in anything previously published. But there was also an inner reason. The Seventh Symphony forms part of a progressive experience. My Life sets out Wagner's experience of Beethoven in terms of an ascent: his reaction to Beethoven's death follows on from an acquaintance with the E major overture to Fidelio, and the symphony, the crowning experience, comes afterwards. This work's ecstatic rhythmic progressions fascinated Wagner all his life; he had already called it the apotheosis of the dance (Art-Work of the Future). In My Life he highlights it for the sake of a narrative that is not only detailed but above all vivid and striking. The autobiography projects a new 'truth'. The early experience, which was based on Wagner's hearing of several symphonies, is modified to fit in with a particular pattern of responses. It is interesting to find that Berlioz wrote with similar emotion of his own Beethoven experience, and that the Seventh Symphony had been the cause of it. In a letter of 1829 he was already writing as follows: Yesterday I went to the Conservatoire concert, where Beethoven's Symphony in A exploded over us. I was very apprehensive about the superb meditation. The listeners who had never heard it before called for a repeat. What agony! . . . Oh, it would have driven me crazy the second time if I hadn't wept tears. Produced by the most sombre and musing of geniuses, this astonishing work is poised between all the rapture, simplicity and tenderness that joy can offer. There arejust two ideas, one being 'I think, therefore I suffer', the other 'I remember, and 16


suffer the more'. Oh, unhappy Beethoven - he too cherished in his heart an ideal world of happiness which he was not allowed to enter. (Grempler [1950], pp. 193, 281 n. 43) The parallel with Berlioz goes even farther. In Wagner's account, Beethoven's image 'melded with that of Shakespeare'. Berlioz writes in his memoirs: In an artist's life one thunderclap sometimes follows swiftly on another, as in those outsize storms in which the clouds, charged to bursting with electric energy, seem to be hurling the lightning back and forth and blowing the whirlwind. I had just had the successive revelations of Shakespeare and Weber. Now at another point on the horizon I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry. (Berlioz [1969], p. 105) Their reactions to the composer's death apart, then, important elements in Wagner's and Berlioz's Beethoven experience are the same. Of course they form different patterns, the main difference being that Wagner experiences all at once what Berlioz expresses on two separate occasions. We may wonder if Wagner was aware of Berlioz's descriptions when he dictated the relevant passages in My Life. Had Berlioz prompted him to portray his own experience on similar lines, starting out with the autobiographical data but amplifying, arranging and colouring them in a particular way (Seventh Symphony, Beethoven/Shakespeare)? Wagner might have learnt of Berlioz's memoirs through Richard Pohl. On the other hand Beethoven and Shakespeare had been linked by writers since E. T. A. Hoffmann and Amadeus Wendt. Different stages in Wagner's Beethoven experience are more or less evident in the Autobiographical Sketch and 'Music of the Future' as well as My Life. Admittedly the Sketch is the only other account to show it as an escalation, stressing elements that came after the initial cause of it. After mentioning the 'all-powerful impression' which Beethoven's music made at the Gewandhaus concerts, Wagner refers to the music for Egmont. It was this which made him want to 'provide a similar music' (SB 1, p. 97) for the tragedy he had finished (Leubald und Adelaide). Thus we find a strong emphasis on the Egmont music, at the expense of the initial Gewandhaus experience. All the same the two impressions are seen as forming one complex. In My Life (p. 31), Wagner again states that 'I now wanted to write incidental music for Leubald und Adelaide, like Beethoven's for Egmont.' But here the matter seems peripheral by comparison with the portrayal of the symphonic experience. The reason why he emphasizes it in the Sketch is probably that upon his return to Germany, Wagner wanted to present himself as a composer who had been already significantly influenced in his youth by Beethoven, not least in his opera composing. As a note to SB 1,

Gradations in the experience No. of works involved in 1st experience

Description in source

Date Starting-point (basic experience)

Red Pocket-Book 1835

indefinite (several works)

'Beethoven's symphonies'

A Pilgrimage to Beethoven 1840

one work

Autobiographical Sketch 1842-3


Climax

Other works in same context

Effect and results of experience

1828

—

'Newly fired passion for music' (Logier: Thoroughbass)

'a Beethoven symphony'

1828

—

illness and recovery as musician

'Beethoven's music'

1828 'Beethoven's music'

—

writes music for tragedy Leubald und Adelaide

Communication to indefinite My Friends 1851 (several works)

'acquaintance with B.'s symphonies'

1828

—

passionate allegiance to music

'Music of the Future' i860


' . . . I now got to know his [B.'s] music'

1827 Beethoven's 1828 death

'I got to know his music...'

—

increasingly strong 'bent for music'

My Life 1865-80

one work named 'finally I heard a symph of the master . . . the A maj Symphony'

1827 Beethoven's 1828 death

'I now wanted to learn more about B.': finds Egmont music on sister's piano; tries to get sonatas

E major overture to Fidelia

merging of Beethoven's image and his music, along with image of Shakespeare

The Work and Mission of my Life 1879


'Beethoven's symphonies'

1828 —

Development

A maj Symphony

'B's music for Egmont inspired me so much . . . '

impassioned conscious devotion to music


p. 112 confirms, the basic purpose of the Autobiographical Sketch was to make Wagner's name known in Germany following his return from Paris. The repercussions of his new Beethoven experience (Habeneck) were, of course, closely connected with the aim of self-promotion: Beethoven's Ninth had inspired Wagner as a composer. It had an appreciable effect on both the Faust Overture and Der Fliegende Hollander. So in the Sketch, Wagner's temporary situation again helped to modify the terms in which he described his original experience of Beethoven. The context of the experience

We must remember that it was not one particular concert performance but several such experiences which made Wagner resolve to be a musician. At the same time we should bear in mind that his recurring experience of Beethoven often happened within the context of the impression which other composers' music was making on him. As late as 1873, Wagner refers to this combination of experiences. For on 9 March Cosima quotes him as saying, 'if I had not received my impressions from Weber and the symphonies of Beethoven, God knows what would have become of me'. Those statements we have already quoted were nearer in time to the event concerned. But they patently match this brief reminiscence when seen in context. Wagner's earliest statement, the one about a 'newly fired passion for music', reflects a new fit of enthusiasm that was caused by Beethoven. It is, however, unthinkable without a remark which relates to the year of 1826 and similarly occurs in the Red Pocket-Book: 'love of music. Passion for Weber...' Here Weber triggers off the initial response to music, in advance of Wagner's enthusiasm for Beethoven. And in 1828, Beethoven's music evidently aroused Wagner's passion directly in conjunction with the music of another composer. The full entry in the Pocket-Book reads: 'Neglect lessons. Get to know Mozart; Beethoven's symphonies. Newly fired passion for music' A year later, in 1829, what triggered off a fresh bout of enthusiasm was apparently an enthusiasm for Mozart communicated to Wagner by Kienlen, the Magdeburg conductor. 'To Magdeburg. Discovery of my passion for music Kiihnlein [sic].' Was it entirely instrumental music that always sparked off Wagner's successive bouts of musical enthusiasm? In this respect Beethoven's music was undoubtedly of great importance, especially certain of the symphonies. But there were other contributory factors deriving from the theatre, and hence from opera as well. According to Deathridge, Wagner's claim to have heard Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient as Fidelio must be untrue, because there is no record of a Leipzig performance of Beethoven's opera in 1829. Be that as it may, Auber's La Muette de Porlici made such an impact on Wagner that it can still be felt in the Recollections of Auberhe wrote in 1871. It •9


is hardly conceivable that he missed the performance on 28 September 1829 in which his sister Rosalie played the title role. The long-term effect of Auber also finds expression in Cosima's diaries. An entry for 9 December 1880 contains some reflections on Wagner's relationship to Beethoven and Auber. Recently, too, when it was suggested that R. had carried on the Beethoven type of melody, he denied it emphatically, saying that had been something complete in itself: 'I could not have composed in the way I have done if Beethoven had never existed, but what I have used and developed are isolated strokes of genius in my dramatic predecessors, including even Auber, allowing myself to be led by something other than opera.'

This shows that Wagner's long-expressed criticisms of opera actually determined (rather than excluded) the lasting impact of certain features, features which pointed beyond the conventional banalities of 'opera' as such. The point is a crucial one. It leads on to^he perception that even in connection with Wagner's earliest musical impressions, Beethoven's symphonic writing left its mark precisely in the context of Wagner's impressions of operatic limits transcended. This is also what makes a performance by Schroder-Devrient important: it went significantly beyond operatic routine. At first, of course, Wagner would hardly have been fully aware of the basic significance of these earliest impressions. But his mind had registered them, and as he developed as an artist, they took on a clear form and thus significance with regard to his own artistic objectives. So was instrumental music really the sole cause of Wagner's enthusiasm for music? What about those impressions of the musical stage he gained through his family and sisters, not least Rosalie? Did they not also play an extremely important role from very early on? Was it that Wagner began - and (secretly) continued - to write music as an. instrumental composer, altogether in line with his enthusiasm for Beethoven, or was it not rather the case that his early musical enthusiasm was already combined with a lively theatrical imagination, and that with the further stimuli of the classical world and literature, this first encouraged him to write for the stage? Did the various criticisms of opera that Wagner voiced as a novice conductor amount to a 'basic critique'? Initially, was it not that he was criticizing the opera of his time and the institutional failings which were bound up with it? And is it legitimate to read Wagner's early work-list selectively, passing over anything, such as the Leubald draft, that does not appear to be related to or validated by a genuinely musical ambition? Let us take as our starting-point Wagner's earliest experience of music as it relates to his other activities. Let us also begin with the premise that very often an artist's early attempts conceal or obscure gifts he will develop and display with panache, once he has realized his potential. Then we shall 20


have to take seriously Wagner's artistic and critical statements in respect of opera and the theatre, hazy and amateurish though they were at the outset, for they point forward to things to come. If we grant equal validity to all the early drafts and trial runs, and extend the young Wagner's work-list beyond 1832, the list will look different to Voss's. Voss leaves out those titles up to the end of 1832 which are marked below with an asterisk, and he does not give the works written up to 1836 in this context. 1826-8, Dresden/Leipzig:

*Leubald, tragedy in 5 acts (WWV 1, pp. 63^) Summer i82g, Leipzig:

Sonata in D minor (WWVn, p. 64) 1829, Leipzig:

•Aria (WWVm, pp. 64f.) Autumn 1829, Leipzig:

String Quartet in D major (WWViv, p. 65) Autumn 1829, Leipzig:

Sonata in F minor for piano (WWV v, p. 65) Spring 1830, Leipzig:

•Pastoral opera (WWVvi, p. 65) 1828-30, Leipzig:

*Lieder(K'Wvii > p. 66) Spring 1830, Leipzig:

*Aria for soprano (WWVvm, p. 67) Summer 1830-Easter 1831, Leipzig:

*Piano reduction, 2 hands, of Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (WWV vs., pp. 67f.) Summer 1830, Leipzig:

Overture in B flat major, nicknamed 'Drum Tap' (WWVx, p. 6g) ^September 1830, Leipzig:

'Political' Overture (WWVxi, p. 70) Summer or Autumn 1830, Leipzig:

Overture to Schiller's tragedy with choruses Die Braut von Messina (WWV xu, pp. 7of.) ?i83O, Leipzig:

Orchestral work in E minor (WWVxin, pp. 7if.) Towards end 1830, Leipzig:

Overture in C major (WWVxw, p. 72) Beginning 0/1831, Leipzig:

•Seven compositions for Goethe's Faust 1 (WWVxv, pp. 72ff.) Beginning of 1831, Leipzig:

Sonata in B flat major, 4 hands (WWVxvi, pp. 75f.) Spring 1831, Leipzig:

Overture in E flat major (WWVxvn, p. 76) 21


Summer 1831, Leipzig:

Piano reduction of J. Haydn, Symphony in E flat major, No. 103 (WWVxvm, pp. 76C) Autumn 1831-Winter 1831/2, Leipzig'*Fugues, incl. 4-part vocal fugue 'Dein ist das Reich' (WWV xix, pp. 77f.) Midsummer-Autumn 1831, Leipzig:

Overture in D minor (Concert Ov. No. 1) (WWVxx, p. 79) Autumn 1831, Leipzig:

Sonata in B flat major for piano, op. 1 (WWVxxi, pp. 82ff.) Autumn 1831, Leipzig:

Fantasy in F sharp minor for piano (WWVXXII, pp. 84ff.) End 1831-Beginning 1832, Leipzig:

Polonaises for piano (WWVxxm, pp. 86ff.) Winter 1831/2, Leipzig:

Overture in E minor and incidental music for Raupach's Konig Enzio {WWVxxiv, pp. 88ff.) PSpring 1832, Leipzig:

Entr'actes tragiques (WWVxxv,

pp. 9iff.)

Beginning 0/1832, Leipzig:

Grand Sonata in A major for piano, op. 4 (WWVxxvi,

pp. 93ff)

March 1832, Leipzig:

Concert Overture No. 2 in C major (WWV xxvn, pp. 95ff.) Spring 1832, Leipzig:

*Scena and aria for soprano and orchestra (WWV xxvm, pp. 97f) ?April-June 1832, Leipzig:

Symphony in C major (WWVxxix,

pp. g8ff.)

12 October 1832, Pravonin nr. Prague:

*'Glockentone', song for voice and piano (WWVxxx, pp. ioif.) Autumn 1832-February 1833, Pravonin/Prague/Leipzig/Wurzburg:

*Die Hochzeit, opera (unfinished) (WWVxxxi,

pp. iO2ff.)

Beginning of 1833-Spring 1834, Leipzig:

*Die Feen, grand romantic opera in three acts (WWVxxxu, pp. 32ff.) September 1833, Wiirzburg:

*New final allegro for Aria No. 15 from Marschner's opera Der Vampyr (WWVxxxm, pp. i2off.) August-September 1834, Lauchstddt/Rudolstadt:

*Symphony in E major (fragment) (WWVxxxv,

pp. I22ff.)

December 1834-January 1835, Magdeburg:

*Overture in E flat major and incidental music for Apel's Columbus (WWVxxxvii, pp. I2 7ff.) Summer 1834-Spring 1836/(1840), Rudolstadt/'Magdeburg: *Das Liebesverbot oder Die Novize von Palermo (WWV x x x v m ,

pp. I3iff.) 22


'Beethoven and instrumental music' — we can be sure that they made a crucial impact on Wagner. But right from the start, Wagner absorbed these impressions within the context of the theatre, dramatic literature and musically heightened scene-painting and stage effects. This is borne out by Cosima's late diary entry about Wagner's partial orientation to Auber; Wagner's remark was certainly not made for publicity purposes. It would be flying in the face of all the evidence to confine Wagner entirely to instrumental music and purely symphonic ambitions as far as his real intentions are concerned. Beethoven's death

Probably the most difficult aspect of Wagner's accounts of his responses to Beethoven is his reaction to the composer's death. 'Music of the Future' and My Life single this out as the starting-point, the event which triggered off all Wagner's successive responses. And bound up with it is the question of when the reaction occurred. According to the other sources it must have been in 1828, because of Wagner's visits to the Gewandhaus concerts after his return to Leipzig. In the two aforementioned accounts, however, Wagner locates his first enduring impression in the year 1827. He tells us in My Life (p. 30) that he learnt of Beethoven's death from his sisters: the news 'had just been received'. During 1826—7 n c w a s living apart from his family, who had moved to Prague. But it is still possible that his relatives told him the news, for Beethoven died on 26 March 1827, and Newman records Wagner as paying a second visit to Prague in the spring of that year. Hence the special importance of the sentence 'I asked my sisters about Beethoven and learned that news of his death had just been received.' Why is it that such a vital part of Wagner's responses to Beethoven emerges so belatedly, and in only two autobiographical documents? Did this reaction really take place at all? Even in the Red Pocket-Book, Wagner does not make the least mention of it. Certainly it is a striking fact that his two references to Beethoven's death appear in accounts which are relatively close together in time but were written for different purposes. Beethoven's stated aim in 'Music of the Future' was to 'give my friends here some information, especially about the formal aspect of my artistic intentions'. All it would supply were some personal details that were of particular relevance in this connection. My Life, on the other hand, implied an autobiography which was to be as complete and thorough as possible. So we cannot just say that Wagner mentioned Beethoven's death in 'Music of the Future' for the sake of completeness. He must have had a stronger reason. It is worth asking whether the reference was not one more product of Schopenhauer's influence, which could have given Wagner's Beethoven 23


experience a new dimension. The fascination for Wagner of the idea of death as Schopenhauer presented it is well known. The ideas which Schopenhauer imparted to him admit of the following conjecture. Although Wagner never referred to this, it is likely that the idea of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, crucially affected the way he wrote about Beethoven's death. Such an explanation gains in cogency when we consider how familiar he was with this idea; it often figures in his writings. (Feuerbach had already broached it in 1834, in his aphorisms Der Schriftsteller und der Mensch.) In German Art and German Politics {GSvm, p. 64), Wagner applies the idea of'reincarnation' to an art fulfilling the classical Greek ideal but designed afresh - and thus in a palpably different sense from the idea of metempsychosis. On the Destiny of Opera illustrates another use of the idea. Here a transmigration forms the starting-point, but Wagner is using the term metaphorically. In practice it was impossible for Shakespeare to act out every one of his roles. The composer, however, achieves this extremely firmly by speaking to us through each of his performers. The soundest technique has infallible laws that govern a transmigration of the soul of the [musical] dramatist into the actor's own body. By giving the beat for a technically accurate performance of his work, the composer becomes totally at one with the musician performing it. If the same could be said of anyone else's work, it could only be that of a visual artist working with colours or with stone, where one might speak of his soul's transmigration into his inanimate material. (GS ix, pp. i5of.; see also x, p. 120) Wagner was, however, already close to the idea of metempsychosis before he encountered Schopenhauer's philosophy. And significantly, it is adumbrated within the context of his responses to Beethoven. The author (who is identical with the narrator) of the story A Pilgrimage to Beethoven states: I no longer partook of any pleasure other than that of immersing myself so deeply in this genius that Ifinallyimagined I had become a part of him; and as this minute particle I began to esteem myself, to hold loftier ideas and views - in short, to become what sensible people are apt to call a fool. Wagner was aware that one of the religious sources of metempsychosis was Brahmanism, as is evident from My Life (p. 530). Here he tells how he assisted Georg Herwegh in finding a suitable framework for 'a vast epic poem': He had once alluded to Dante's good fortune infindingsuch an apt subject as the path through hell and purgatory to paradise. This gave me the idea to suggest for the framework of his poem the myth of metempsychosis, which, from its source in the Brahmin religion, through Plato impinged even upon our classical culture. He found this idea not bad at all, so I went even further and sketched the form such a poem should take; he should divide it in three main acts, each in three cantos ... 24


The first part would show the principal figure in his Asiatic homeland, the second in the Hellenistic-Roman world, and the third in his rebirth in the medieval and modern world. Wagner also applied the idea of reincarnation to family relationships. On 28 May 1879 he wrote a revealing letter to Ludwig II of Bavaria. It describes the theatricality of his birthday celebration a few days earlier and includes the following lines: Propped up in the centre of the hall was a new portrait of my wife painted by Lenbach, which was quite incredible in its artistic beauty and perfection. This surprise had been carefully prepared. My son Siegfried was posing in front of the picture, wearing black velvet and with blond tresses (very like the young Van Dyck's portrait). He was meant to be representing - in a symbolical rebirth - my father Ludwig Geyer: he was called 'Ludwig the painter' and was still working on the portrait with a maulstick and brush, as though he were adding the finishing touches... (BLWin, p. 153) But the idea of metempsychosis must have taken a particularly strong hold on Wagner in i860, when he was planning 'Music of the Future'. At the beginning of August he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck: Only a profound acceptance of the doctrine of metempsychosis has been able to console me by revealing the point at which all things finally converge at the same level of redemption, after the various individual existences - which run alongside each other in time - have come together in a meaningful way outside time. According to the beautiful Buddhist doctrine, the spotless purity of Lohengrin is easily explicable in terms of his being the continuation of Parzifal - who was the first to strive towards purity. Elsa, similarly, would reach the level of Lohengrin through being reborn. (SL, p. 499) Just as Wagner saw his two opera heroes as being united through a transmigration of souls, so he saw his own creative life as a continuation of Beethoven's on a higher plane, through the same compelling process. The musical dramatist in Wagner was a rebirth, an intensification of the tone-poet in Beethoven. This was symbolized by the fact that the news of Beethoven's death, and the 'strange anguish' Wagner felt at the news, led him to take up the dead master's music. It was the other's death which first really gave life to the musician in Wagner. This explanation becomes even more obvious when we consider the claim Wagner had already made in Paris in 1840-1 that he alone was qualified to succeed Beethoven, and to round off what Beethoven had struggled to achieve. In that context, the passage we have quoted from the Paris novella takes on a special importance. We might further bear in mind Wagner's view of the redemptive role of art, along with his selfappointed historical task of using art to complete that process of redemption which Beethoven had initiated. And if so, then our explanation shows 2

5


how an aesthetic precept was simply being extended into the realm of metaphysics. Response pattern and autobiography3

The narrative of My Life contains two indications that an extra-musical factor was combined with a musical one in Wagner's response to Beethoven. His 'strange anguish' at the news of Beethoven's death accords with his 'childish dread of the ghostly fifths on the violin'. This emotional state is also part of Wagner's range of responses to the Ninth Symphony, because of the way the Ninth begins. Moreover - and this is our second indication the musical effect made by the Seventh Symphony combines with the 'impact of Beethoven's physiognomy . . . as well as the knowledge of his deafness and his solitary and withdrawn life'. Thus there soon arose in Wagner's mind 'an image of the highest supernal originality'. Wagner really did experience things on more than one level at once. Let us take the evidence of his oft-quoted letter of 30 January 1844 to Carl Gaillard. This reveals the sharpness of Wagner's perceptions about himself — although, of course, they lack the orderliness of a trained psychologist's. In discussing the creative process, the letter outlines Wagner's artistic make-up: It is not my practice to choose a subject at random, to versify it & then think of suitable music to write for it; - if I were to proceed in that way I should be exposed to the difficulty of having to work myself up to a pitch of enthusiasm on two separate occasions, something which is impossible. No, my method of production is different from that: - in the first place I am attracted only by those subjects which reveal themselves to me not only as poetically but, at the same time, as musically significant. And so, even before I set about writing a single line of the text or drafting a scene, I am already thoroughly immersed in the musical aura of my new creation, I have the whole sound & all the characteristic motives in my head so that when the poem is finished & the scenes are arranged in their proper order the actual opera is already completed, & its detailed musical treatment is more a question of calm & reflective revision, the moment of actual creativity having already passed. But for this to be so, I must choose only subjects which are capable of an exclusively musical treatment: I would never, for example, choose a subject which a skilled playwright could just as well turn into a spoken drama. 4 (SL, p. 118)

The above statement is dealing with the same interaction of musical and extra-musical grades of feeling in Wagner's creative life that occurs in his experience of Beethoven. As a creator of music dramas, Wagner selected only those subjects which presented both dramatic and musical possibilities. This has a parallel in the response mechanism: in the association of a 'strange anguish' at the news of Beethoven's death with the 'dread of the ghostly fifths on the violin', as also in the fusion of the Seventh Symphony's 'indescribable' effect with the impact made by Beethoven's appearance 26


and fate. With both the experiencing process and the creative process, the structure of the underlying artistic make-up is the same. Wagner's letter to Gaillard is an early (if not the very first) expression of his thoughts about his own creative methods. If we look at his statement in A Communication to My Friends (GS iv, pp. 267, 3 i6f), we will be left with the impression that this particular working method crystallized only little by little, from unconscious beginnings. In 1842, two years before the letter to Gaillard, Wagner wrote the essay Halevy and French Opera. There he speaks only of the ideal instance of two old friends, a musician and a dramatic poet who are in mutual sympathy, and who arrive jointly at the subject and design of their dramatic creation. We have found a fundamental agreement between the productive and receptive processes. This suggests that the information about the combined action of the two levels is basically correct. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, of course, Wagner would hardly have perceived any of this. Rather he would achieve an analysis and synopsis only when he had attained to a clear view of himself and, reliving his early impressions and experiences, tried to discern in them the seeds of what came later. It is highly probable that in the course of this self-exegesis, the composer introduced some details which had not been part of the original experience, and modified others which he no longer recalled all that clearly. It will, however, hardly have been mere chance or a whim that led Wagner to use his Beethoven experience to illustrate his own musical awakening and the specific character of his artistic make-up. Wagner's accounts of his Beethoven experience contain inconsistencies and errors. But to regard them as indicating a general tendency towards untruth and distortion, and to lump them together as failings of which he alone was guilty, would be to misunderstand the task and function of autobiographical writings. The pursuit of autobiography, says Roy Pascal (i960), is a subtle penetration of the past by the present. It is wrong to expect 'to evoke circumstances and experiences as they actually were for the child and young man. We do not need to consult psychologists as to whether this is a feasible task; it is clearly impossible...' (p. 14). To establish some criteria for an appraisal of Wagner's autobiographical writings, it will be useful to quote Pascal at greater length. Autobiography, he says, involves the reconstruction of the movement of a life, or part of a life, in the actual circumstances in which it was lived ... But 'reconstruction of a life' is an impossible task. A single day's experience is limitless in its radiation backward and forward. So that we have to hurry to qualify the above assertions by adding that autobiography is a shaping of the past. It imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story ... This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life, and interprets his life from it 27


... Autobiography, as A. M. Clark said, is not the annals of a man's life, but its 'philosophical history'. (Pascal [i960], p. 9) In the German edition of his study, Pascal goes on to say: The insight that memory has a shaping function was responsible for the title of Goethe's autobiography. Goethe writes that, modestly enough, he called it Dichtung und Wahrheit ['Poetry and Truth'] because of his deep conviction that 'in the present, and indeed even in retrospect, a person builds up a picture of the external world that conforms to the quirks of his own nature'. So the discrepancies in Wagner's accounts of his Beethoven experience are nothing unusual as autobiographies go. The momentous effect of just one symphony as described in the Paris novella, the emphasis on Beethoven's music for Egmont in connection with Leubald und Adelaide, the climactic role of the Seventh Symphony in My Life -each was prompted by Wagner's particular situation at the time he was writing. The inclusion and highlighting of Beethoven's death in 'Music of the Future' and My Life resulted from a specific philosophical stance, a stance which was influenced by Schopenhauer and the information that he provided on Indian religion. But the development of a response pattern such as is demonstrated by the Beethoven experience in My Life was the result of Wagner's perception of his personal creative make-up. He was projecting this back upon the early experience in order to interpret that experience (and also to correct Schopenhauer, as we shall see), no matter how he actually remembered it. The present study can only give some indication of Wagner's make-up as an autobiographer. If we examined all his writings with this in mind, our findings would probably confirm what is, perhaps, especially pronounced with Wagner: the textural richness of the autobiographical fabric. While our own study may draw certain conclusions from Wagner's accounts of his Beethoven experience, those conclusions ought not to be generalized. All the same, it would hardly be going too far to say that Wagner's Beethoven experience is one of the central strands. According to Roy Pascal (pp. 185-6), the main achievement of the art of autobiography is to give us events that symbolize the essence of the author's personality. It affords an 'intuitive knowledge of some unique experience' (Susanne Langer's phrase) which 'as such is representative of life altogether'. And that can be said of the illumination Wagner received in responding to Beethoven's music. But Wagner's response to Beethoven is also central in a different sense, in that it gives some indication of his basic approach to autobiography. Doubtless almost every autobiography includes a myth-making element. Looking back, the author interprets the past from a present standpoint, or 'actualizes' [vergegenwdrtigt] it; he recasts the historical substance as a 'coherent' and 'philosophical' story. With Wagner, however, this mythmaking streak is idiosyncratic and especially strongly pronounced. In his 28

WAGNER'S EXPERIENCE OF BEETHOVEN

autobiographical writings - and not only there - Wagner is constantly addressing the public afresh, and for a purpose. And propaganda is invariably part of the aim. In other words, Wagner was always writing not only for his own times but also for the future, and particularly his own future. Thus his Beethoven experience as stylized in the novella A Pilgrimage denotes a meeting that was germane to his future artistic development. Wagner's account in My Life, however, is meant to go farther than that and serve the future interests of his own myth or self-image. His autobiographical writing involves not only an 'actualization' [Vergegenwdrtigung] of past events through 'reminiscence' [Erinnerung] but also a 'presentiment' [Ahnung]: an inkling of events yet to happen - and of how they would happen. So by studying Wagner's response to Beethoven, we can see his autobiographical writing as being based on the same structure as that used by him as librettist and composer to organize the mythical subjects of his music dramas. Wagner produced quite enough selfexplanations to drive home the parallel. As the successive stages of a Wagnerian drama unfold, musical events ('leitmotifs') already familiar to us will be actualized through reminiscence. But thanks to the overall dramatic design, they will at the same time convey a presentiment of future events. (We shall discuss this at greater length on pp. 146-9.) In the same way, Wagner keeps presenting another version of his Beethoven experience, each version being directed towards the future as well as recalling and reviving the past. Wagner's approach to autobiography corresponds to the construction of myth. This is particularly evident if we remember that the first description of the Beethoven experience in the Red Pocket-Book is treated like a 'musical event', a dramatically motivated state of emotion, as it were, like a 'leitmotif. Wagner has this ability to manipulate his description; besides 'Beethoven's symphonies' he mentions his 'newly fired passion for music'. It was a simple matter to give this emotion fresh nuances, depending on his personal prospects and the consequent purpose of the piece of writing concerned. This kind of experience made an immediate impact but also had lasting effects. It entitles us to use the term Erlebnisse ('experiences', with the nuance of 'lived events') to describe the young Wagner's salient artistic impressions. As a coinage the word at first occurs only sporadically - in the writings of Ludwig Tieck, for instance - in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet the actual concept was already common in the age of Goethe. And because of the type of experience it represented, and its role in a person's life, the word itself evolved from autobiography. This is illustrated by Wagner's autobiographical writings, including, significantly enough, the entries in his early Pocket-Book. Here he expressly records events in his artistic experience that precisely match - and that he uses and reuses in just such a way - the essential meaning of the word Erlebnis. As Gadamer 2

9


defined it, an experience turned into an Erlebnis when it was not merely lived through but had a special impact endowing it with lasting significance. The lasting element is what produces the 'material quality' of the Erlebnis. It becomes the subject of an autobiographical 'treatment' in which the author surveys and interprets his own life, and endows it with meaning. Cosima's diaries are a good example of this. They contain numerous passages - passages of reminiscence, but particularly reflections on events and landmarks in Wagner's life - which show that it is 'in the very nature of an Erlebnis to go on having an effect. As Nietzsche says, all experiences go on for a long time within people of depth' (Gadamer 1972, p. 63). Wagner's earliest experiences stretch right across his life and were the catalysts of its 'poetic truth'. And this confers on the 'poetic truth' of his autobiography a special quality as a statement, one which sets it on a par with the - equally important - 'empirical truth'. Scholars such as Deathridge in The New Grove Wagner, Voss and Lichtenhahn have criticized the first in the light of the second. But to do so is at the same time to bring out its own intrinsic character and to confirm its intrinsic value.

Stations and function of the Beethoven experience Hearing Beethoven the symphonist

Wolzogen tells us that even in old age, Wagner considered it the 'greatest honour to be allowed to listen' to works by Beethoven (Wolzogen [1891], p. 26). Wagner did not say this in connection with a particularly successful performance, a special event. Rather it was said of a Beethoven quartet despite a rough-and-ready rendering of it on the piano, during the customary gatherings at the Haus Wahnfried — a mixture of friendly domestic music-making and absorbed hero-worship. Beethoven's music constantly inspired Wagner afresh, even prompting him to execute dance steps and gestures. According to Ludwig Schemann, the 'cheerful sections of the String Quartet op. 127' sparked off an uninhibited display of his own cheerful reactions; he danced, leapt about and teased his companions. And according to Cosima's note, not long before his death, on 10 January 1883, he twice came dancing in whilst Liszt was playing the 'Andante of Beethoven's A major Symphony and the Scherzo allegretto of the F major [Symphony]'. Given the liveliness of Wagner's artistic sensibilities, it is not surprising that he always retained his capacity for fresh experiences. In the latter part of his life, the music of Mozart and especially Bach drew enthusiastic and thoughtful comments from him as well. But the remarkable thing is how far the dynamic responses which Beethoven's art evoked in him are woven into the whole fabric of Wagner's life. And up to now this has never been studied in detail.

3°


Unlike so many youthful artistic impressions, Wagner's earliest Beethoven experience was not overlaid, and eventually ousted, by other happenings. Rather, through the linking together of specific events over a period of years, its structure took on the role of a paradigm. And it was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that governed the particular pattern of Wagner's successive responses, important stages in his life being associated with it. First there was Paris (1839), then Dresden (1846-9), and later Bayreuth (1872).In all probability Wagner's enthusiasm for the Ninth was kindled soon after the Gewandhaus event in January 1828. In the well-known letter of 6 October 1830 to Schotts, offering them his arrangement of the Ninth for two hands (WPVVix), he wrote that he had studied 'Beethoven's splendid last symphony' most intensively for a long time (SB 1, p. 117). This was no exaggeration. Besides the piano arrangement, he had made a copy of the complete score, a feat which he described in My Life (p. 35) as an act of'arbitrary self-education'. Clearly it was a special type of self-education, for the nocturnal hours he devoted to it were also spent immersed in extravagant imaginings. The open fifths at the start conjured up his very first musical experience, the violins of an orchestra tuning up, and this realm of feeling merged with an existential premonition. As with his earliest experience, a musical feeling of eeriness became entwined with his personal destiny. Onfirstlooking through the score, which I obtained only with great difficulty, I was struck at once, as if by force of destiny, with the long-sustained perfect fifths with which thefirstmovement begins: these sounds, which played such a spectral role in my earliest impressions of music, came to me as the ghostly fundamental of my own life. This symphony surely held the secret to all secrets; and so I got busy over it by painstakingly copying out the score. Once, after having spent a night at this task, I remember being startled by the dawn, which affected me so strongly in my excited condition that I buried myself under the bedclothes with a loud shriek as if terrified (My Life, pp. 35-6) by an apparition. Wagner was surely referring to the same period when he said in My Life (p. 429) that he had been driven 'by the mystical influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to plumb the deepest recesses of music'. There is also the passage (p. 175) where he speaks of the 'mystic constellations and soundless magic spirits' he initially associated with the work. There is good reason to stress the constancy of Wagner's enthusiasm for Beethoven. But to think that there were no crises in this relationship (as Westernhagen does), and that Wagner never had any doubts or criticisms, does not square with the facts. There were times when he wavered over the Ninth Symphony itself. This began with a rehearsal under August Pohlenz in 1830, in the Leipzig Gewandhaus; My Life (p. 57) describes Wagner's disappointment and above all his bewilderment. Since he had yet to form a clear idea of the work, he could not maintain all his enthusiasm for it in the face of so negative an impression. The result was that Mozart came more to 31


the forefront. The importance of this episode emerges from My Life. Wagner says that with the help of the contrapuntal skills acquired through Weinlig, he had learnt to appreciate and tried to copy the 'light and flowing manner in which Mozart handled the most complex technical problems', especially in the finale of the 'Jupiter' Symphony. In spite of a certain loss of enthusiasm, however, the link with Beethoven was not broken off; rather it became more objective. For the time being, though, the gap between Wagner and Beethoven was to grow even wider. In a letter of 7 August 1836 to Heinrich Dorn, Wagner described himself as a 'ci-devant Beethovenian'. He thought at the time that he needed to aim for an ideal solution by using some of the components of Italian and French opera. This is quite evident from a letter he wrote to Meyerbeer on 4 March 1837. Wagner's unsettled attitude to Beethoven during this period becomes plain to behold when we compare his statements in My Life about the two earliest operatic events that were associated in his mind with Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient, the famous singer. He describes his reaction to a Fidelio performance as one of helpless enthusiasm: I did not know where to turn or even how to begin to produce anything remotely commensurable with the impressions I had received . . . I wanted to write a work that would be worthy of Schroder-Devrient: but as that was by no means within my power I abandoned all artistic efforts in headlong despair... (My Life, p. 37)

Deathridge assumes that this early Fidelio experience is a fiction on Wagner's part, because 'the performance is not mentioned in his diary, the Red Pocket-Book, and there is no trace of it in the theatre records of the period' (NGW, p. 7). The fact that this event does not appear in either source is of course striking. But the omission is surely no positive proof that it never happened. Wagner did not record every major event in his Red Pocket-Book by any means. We have also to consider that in My Life Wagner says that when he was subsequently Kapellmeister at the Royal Saxon Court, Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient herself reminded him of his enthusiastic letter to her. As far as the theatre records [Theaterzettel] are concerned, there is - according to the City of Leipzig Museum for History - an eleven-day gap for the period in question (April 1829), and it is uncertain whether this gap is because of missing Zettel or because there were no performances on those days. Moreover, is it still possible to check all the press notices? It must also be borne in mind that directly before her long Paris engagement (1830), Schroder-Devrient sang in many cities as a guest artist and may have stepped in at short notice on occasion. Thus her omission from the contemporary press organs and Theaterzettel does not suffice to show that she did not sing in Fidelio at Leipzig in 1829. 32


And one further consideration is relevant here. In the summer of 1829, Wagner travelled to Magdeburg; can we be entirely sure that he did not go to Dresden as well? There is proof that Beethoven's Fidelio was performed in Dresden on 22 and 25 August and again on 11 October, with SchroderDevrient in the leading role! And even if Wagner did not go to Dresden, would not the reports of her performance that surely reached him have been enough to kindle his imagination? And even if we posit a 'falsification' on Wagner's part, would this not simply be telling us that he was extremely fascinated by Beethoven and wanted to show that Beethoven had legitimatized his own creative work and its intention? But was there, then, ever any need for such a falsification? Does Wagner's extraordinary - and welldocumented - early commitment to Beethoven's Ninth not speak for itself? We can state quite positively that the question-mark behind the documentary evidence regarding the Beethoven experience that SchroderDevrient sparked offin Wagner only underlines Beethoven's importance to him. It points to a deeper truth. When Wagner heard Schroder-Devrient in Bellini's opera / Capuleti ed i Montecchi, his response was quite different: The palpable change in my estimate of the German composers I had revered and venerated ... was ... mainly attributable to my impressions of another guest performance in Leipzig by Schroder-Devrient, who carried everyone away with her interpretation of Romeo in Bellini's Romeo andJuliet. The effect was unlike anything we had ever experienced. The sight of the boldly romantic figure of the young hero, projected against a background of such obviously shallow and empty music, prompted one at all events to ruminate on the causes of the inefFectuality of most of the solid German music used in drama up to now. Without yet losing myself in these meditations too deeply, I allowed myself to be borne along by the current of my excitable youthful sensibility and was instinctively impelled to cast off that brooding seriousness which in my earlier years had driven me to such dramatic mysticism .. .Just as I had sown my wild oats as a student, I now boldly embarked on the same course in the development of my artistic tastes. {My Life, pp. 80-1, slightly amended) The gulf dividing good from unsuccessful musical interpretations must have made Wagner more discriminating with regard to the qualities of a performance. These experiences formed the background to the lasting effect of later Beethoven performances. Thus a negative experience of the Ninth Symphony paved the way for the especially profound and enduring effect of new and positive impressions. Only now can we fully comprehend the role of the Paris interpretation under Habeneck. On that occasion Wagner first got to know Beethoven's Ninth in a rendering which stood out favourably from other renderings. Later he recalled a rehearsal of the first three movements, 'undertaken by the incomparable orchestra of the Conservatoire'. Suddenly, he wrote, after 'years of bewildering confusion', it put him 'miraculously in touch' with those early youthful days and had 33


'sown the seeds of an inner change of direction . . . as though exerting a magic force'. The memory appears in My Life (p. 329). Wagner refers only to the first three movements of the symphony, and scholars have often followed him in this respect. But it is doubtful whether this account sets out all the facts. Other passages in his writings (such as GS xii, p. 82; viii, pp. 166 and 16) admit of the inference that he definitely heard the entire work under Habeneck's direction, including the finale. In some writings he speaks first and foremost of concert performances. It has been established that during his Paris stay-from the autumn of 1839 to the spring of 1842 - Wagner had three opportunities to hear a complete concert performance of the Ninth. It would be unwise to assume that he did not avail himself of them. We must therefore start out from the premise that Wagner heard Beethoven's Ninth in Paris more than once. But when did he hear Habeneck conduct it; and more particularly, when did Wagner first hear him conduct it? Was it, as stated in My Life, at a rehearsal of the first three movements near the end of 1839, or was it at a performance of the whole work - very probably the concert of 8 March 1840? (We have no means of checking the authenticity of the statement on p. 242 of the Bayreuther Blatter of 1894 that Wagner first heard the Ninth on 8 March 1840. At all events this statement was not published in his lifetime, i.e. with his knowledge. It does not effectively challenge the hypothesis that after hearing the rehearsal, Wagner naturally attended the concert on 8 March 1840 as well, in order to hear the symphony as a whole for the first time.)

Because documentary evidence is lacking, we cannot give a definite answer to the above question. But if Wagner heard both Habeneck's concert performance and his rehearsal, why does he make so much of the latter? One suspects that he was particularly impressed by the rehearsal experience. It would have been the first time Wagner had actually heard a Beethoven work in Paris. The impression was wholly fresh and unexpected, and the surprise element associated with this rehearsal made a special impact; the subsequent concert performance would have been tame by comparison. And another factor may have been the evocation, once again, of the original experience of the open fifths at the start. Compared to that, the finale would have come as a let-down, because of the inferiority of Habeneck's rendering of it. Voss and Deathridge have strongly challenged these propositions. They think it may have been impossible for Wagner to have heard a rehearsal of the first three movements towards the end of 1839. The Conservatoire orchestra played the Ninth Symphony relatively often, and there had already been two performances in 1839, o n I 0 February and 21 April. For that reason, Voss and Deathridge argue, no rehearsal was scheduled, the next performance not being due until 8 March 1840, which was a relatively 34


long time off. So Voss and Deathridge are very sceptical about Wagner's account in My Life — as they are quite entitled to be, in theory. The real purpose of their objection, however, is to show up as a 'mystification' (Voss) the link Wagner declared between the experience of hearing the Ninth rehearsed and his Faust Overture. They posit an influence expressly emanating from Berlioz's 'Romeo et Juliette' symphony instead. Our immediate reaction to this is to say that they are surely right about the influence of Berlioz. But does this necessarily rule out an orientation towards Beethoven at the time in question? One of our reasons for asking this is that there are several possible objections to the theory that Wagner did not hear, and could not have heard, the Ninth in rehearsal. The basic objection to the standpoint of Voss and Deathridge is that theirs, too, is purely conjectural — starting out from certain pointers. As we have said, we still lack any evidence that would enable us to 'authenticate' the one standpoint or the other. But the anti-rehearsal arguments do clash with counter-arguments that start out from different factors, and that show that Wagner's statement is eminently credible. Our first counter-argument is based on the fact that Wagner - at two different points in My Life (p. 174 and p. 329) - explicitly mentions a rehearsal. And why does he speak only of the first three movements? Why mention this point, when the experience would have seemed of much greater significance if Wagner had described it as a concert performance complete with that choral finale which played such a vital role in his later teleological interpretation? We can hardly suppose that it was a subtle lie designed to provide the counter-argument we have just stated. The second of our critical factors arises from a closer scrutiny of the rehearsals at which the Conservatoire orchestra played through one or possibly two of Wagner's overtures. Wagner's letters clearly refer to a rehearsal at which quite obviously his Columbus overture was played. This was on 4 February 1840 (see SB 1, p. 379). But on 7 December 1839 Habeneck had already rehearsed a work by Wagner, for Meyerbeer made a note of the rehearsal in his pocket diary. We do not know which work was played on that occasion. Probably it was not the Columbus but the Polonia overture, or else the Concert Overture in C major. It is altogether possible that Wagner heard the first three movements of Beethoven's Ninth at this rehearsal. As an orchestral trainer Habeneck was keen, persevering and meticulous, and it would not have been odd for him to rehearse a work in between scheduled performances. This thesis is all the more likely because according to Elwart, the last 1839 performance, on 21 April, included only the second and fourth movements. Moreover Habeneck was entirely receptive to special requests, as the rehearsals of Wagner's overture or overtures prove. And the thesis that - with Meyerbeer's help - Wagner persuaded Habeneck to play the Ninth at the rehearsal of 7 December seems an altogether obvious one. For Habeneck's Beethoven performances 35


were already legend when Wagner arrived in Paris, and there can be no doubt that it was Wagner's firm intention to hear them as soon as he could. Let us now consider the date of the first complete sketch of the Faust Overture and the final date of the work. The first is 13 December 1839, the second 12 January 1840. Assuming that Wagner heard the Conservatoire orchestra rehearse the first three movements of the Ninth on 7 December, it is perfectly conceivable that Beethoven's Ninth made some impact on the work he had already started to compose. All the same, it would be a mistake to view the connection between the Faust Overture and the Ninth Symphony as being altogether direct and manifesting itself'physically' in evidence of Beethoven's fingerprints. Just to leave it at that would be wrong. For in certain areas, Beethoven had left his mark on the atmosphere of Parisian musical life, not just the concert repertoire. There were not only the Conservatoire orchestral concerts but also other Beethoven performances, plus numerous publications, press articles and so forth dealing with Beethoven's personality and his compositions. It was Habeneck's performances that established and increased the general recognition of Beethoven in France. But the critical writings of Castil-Blaze and Berlioz contributed significantly to the spread of Beethoven's fame in that country. Behind the announcement in Le Siecle of a quartet 'session' to be held by Pierre Baillot lay the knowledge that this French violinist was an expert in Beethoven's music. And Le Figaro helped to popularize Beethoven by publishing extracts from G. E. Anders's translation of the Wegeler-Ries Biographische Notizen on 24 February 1839. Despite the hectic time he spent lobbying for work and support, Wagner with his sensitivity to musical atmosphere must have absorbed all this very quickly and developed a new alertness to Beethoven. And even if he did not hear the Ninth before producing his Faust Overture, the latter work provided ample scope for mysteriously far-reaching expression. The radiance to be thrown back by Beethoven's last symphony, shortly afterwards, could be combined with thematic material and an instrumentation whose extravagance bears the hallmark of Berlioz. Voss examines the question of influences in line with traditional research methods. Does the theme in bars 6gf. and bars 73-80 of the overture, he asks, correspond more closely to bars 16—22 in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth or to bars 2 7of. of the Coriolan Overture? But this will not do for various reasons. First of all, when considering the points of similarity and divergence in each case, it is barely possible to make out the decisive factor. Is it the upbeat element and downward-moving curve with its rhythmic readjustment (akin to the Ninth Symphony), or the rhythmic pulse which governs the note-sequence throughout and is notated as a dotted crotchet plus quaver (akin to the Coriolan Overture)? And secondly, as evocative devices Beethoven's two themes are similar enough to afford equal access to the associative sphere which Wagner was to delineate as 36


'Faustian'. From his viewpoint, is it not possible to project Coriolanus's heroic self-assertion at all costs and the Ninth's striving for human brotherhood equally with Faustian ambition upon a common, decidedly far-reaching musical statement? There is also another obvious counter-argument. Wagner wrote a 'programme' for the Ninth Symphony in 1846. Is it mere chance that this was based on the Faust material he used as a programme to boost his Paris overture? Granted, this later association of the Ninth with Goethe's drama could have occurred independently of the Faust Overture. But is it not a likelier thesis that Wagner associated all three works with one another within a short space of time? It was, after all, only ten months after finishing the Faust Overture, i.e. in November 1840, that he published his novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven in the Revue el gazette musicale. This was

where he had his first shot at interpreting the finale to the Ninth, which indicates how strongly and quickly the work impressed him all over again in Paris. Surely Wagner was reacting, here, to Habeneck's performance(s)? Moreover the novella depicts Beethoven as a suffering composer, but also as a composer fighting for a revolutionary idea. Here, surely, Wagner is portraying the problems of an artist's livelihood, problems of the kind he was experiencing himself in Paris. And does this not again tie in with both the Faust Overture and Wagner's programme for the Ninth? For in the latter, passages from Goethe's drama are used to present the struggle to survive as a precondition of the choral finale, which transcends earthly problems. So even if Wagner did not immediately associate Goethe's drama with the Faust Overture, there was from the outset an internal affinity between them, and it governs the whole character of the overture. This lends a more than passing significance to Cosima's diary entry of 2 August 1879: 'Faust arrives; he [Wagner] has given me his old copy, which came from Minna and which contains his markings for the Faust Overture and the Ninth, and I lay an identical copy at his feet.' We should remember, too, that what Wagner had in mind was not simply an overture. Originally he had intended to compose a four-movement symphony. This in itself brings the projected Faust piece closer to Beethoven's Ninth than to the Berlioz composition. And for all the echoes of Berlioz which have rightly been pointed out, we must not overlook another factor. As with the late works of Beethoven, Wagner's slow introduction has the function of an exposition and is already part of the thematic working-out. Hence it is closely related to the Ninth Symphony, where this element determines the opening of the first movement, although in a different way (see Schenker's analysis). So entirely to reverse the thesis of Beethoven's influence in favour of that of Berlioz is to do Wagner less than justice. Rather, he was combining the two influences - and plainly in a wider sense than merely that of a literal similarity between the notes. 37


In addition it is by no means the case that in describing his Berlioz experience, Wagner wrote a panegyric that could only be compared to his raptures over Beethoven. Nor can we agree with Voss that Wagner could not have heard a rehearsal of Beethoven's Ninth because there is no mention of it in the early Autobiographical Sketch and A Communication to My

Friends. For the same writings fail to mention the impact of the 'Romeo et Juliette' symphony. It is only in My Life that Wagner takes that work as the theme, so to speak, of his Berlioz experience. Exactly the same applies to the rehearsal of the Ninth and his Beethoven experience, and surely this is striking? It should also be noted that even in letters dating from the time of the first performances of'Romeo et Juliette' (24 November to 15 December 1839), Wagner never mentions the symphony. The first time he refers to it is on 27 March 184.1: permit me on this occasion, therefore, to say only a few things about the personal impression which my acquaintance with Berlioz has left on me. Thefirstpiece of his that I heard was his Romeo & Juliet symphony, in which the insipidity of the work's outward economy violently repelled me, for all the composer's evident genius. (SL, p. 77) How do these statements square with what Wagner said some twenty-five years later in My Life? Did he not see Berlioz as a thoroughly ambiguous figure, his genius notwithstanding? Surely, despite his criticisms of Beethoven, his statements praising the latter stand out by virtue of their basically positive tone? Berlioz, then, may have stimulated and guided Wagner's composition of the Faust Overture, but his was not the only influence. It was Beethoven who determined the background, the work's essential, interior dimension. At the time Wagner was having a hard struggle to find his artistic bearings (see also Lichtenhahn [1972], pp. 143-60), and trying to reconcile opposing or rival artistic trends. This makes a combination of several influences especially plausible. What is certain is that in view of his difficult outward position and divided inner state, Wagner very soon came to regard Beethoven as a new guiding light. Berlioz and Beethoven were rival but not mutually exclusive influences. Already in Paris, however, Beethoven very soon overshadowed the figure of Berlioz. The prime example of this is, within the context of Wagner's Beethoven novella, the Faust Overture. No matter which of Habeneck's performances Wagner heard, Habeneck's interpretation of Beethoven is closely connected with the importance the composer assumed for Wagner during his stay in Paris. He was undoubtedly expecting insights from Habeneck that had been hitherto denied him. Surely Habeneck was bound to see those things that had been beyond a conductor like Pohlenz? As his retrospective remarks make clear, Wagner was partly enthusiastic, but partly disappointed. Although 38


Habcneck had rehearsed the first three movements better than anyone else, the finale to the Ninth evidently suffered by comparison, even when he was conducting. There is a contemporary witness to this. Anton Schindler made two extended visits to Paris in 1841-2 and attended the Conservatoire orchestra's rehearsals and concerts. In both his diary and the pamphlet Beethoven in Paris (1842), Schindler is full of praise for Habeneck and his players, but he also makes a number of critical comments. His opinion of the performance of the Ninth Symphony, while generally couched in superlatives, is not so positive with regard to two passages in the finale, the recitative on the double basses and cellos and the melody of 'Freude, schoner Gotterfunken'. Schindler thought both were too slow. His comment on the 'Freude' melody is particularly revealing: Habeneck took the melody of'Freude schoner Gotterfunken' at an extremely slow tempo, so that it sounded as woeful as the preceding recitative on the basses. Here he was being misled by a faulty translation of the words. ([1842], pp. 39/.)

Wagner's own disappointment can still be sensed in what he wrote thirty years later in On Conducting. While acknowledging all Habeneck's merits, he denies him any genius, and that remark is bitter indeed. But after his bad rehearsal experience with Pohlenz, Wagner had gone away sorry and confused. This time, on the other hand, he tried to solve the finale riddle, fired by the impression of the first three movements, and driven by a desire to improve on Habeneck's interpretation. Thus Wagner had his reasons for passing over the problematic finale in his reports from Paris, as also in later references to the impressions of his first stay. But it became the central topic of a work in which he endeavoured to explain the riddle - the 1840 novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven. Its significance in the present context is that it was Wagner's first attempt to elucidate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and it established the basic drift of his later interpretations. His explanation begins with the finale. In private conversation Beethoven confides his most intimate artistic plans, and thereby the answer to the finale, to his young visitor, who is Wagner's poeticized self-portrait. Here Wagner arrives at that interpretation which was later to harden into dogma. Let those wild primal emotions that stretch out into the infinite, that are represented by instruments, be contrasted with the clear, definite emotions of the human heart, represented by the human voice. The addition of the second element will work beneficently and soothingly upon the conflict of the elemental emotions . . . (Kolodin [1962], p. 33)

What governed Wagner's reading of the Ninth was a process beginning with the sense of expectancy aroused by the first movement, through the open fifths. A programmatically conceived interpretation starting with the finale becomes clear-cut only with the onset of a specific period, which we 39


can identify as the Paris years. This interpretation too underwent a development. Its stages are measured by the extent to which the mainly emotional aspect, based on the first movement, was integrated with the mainly intellectual aspect, which was based on the last movement. What characterizes the Paris stage is this. The difference in quality between Habeneck's performance of the earlier movements and the finale on the one hand, and Wagner's varying responsiveness to the first and last movements on the other, inspired Wagner with a single aim. This was to understand the work from the perspective of the finale (although the interpretation would not yet include every factor). Words, even though Schiller had written them, were directly blocking the 'poetry' that mattered to Beethoven as Wagner saw him. Wagner had Habeneck to thank for a clearer and firmer definition of his image of Beethoven. Nonetheless, Habeneck was a 'typical' Frenchman. Clarity in the phrasing of a melody, technical perfection, mechanical work-throughs until it was all stupendously polished: these were the attributes that Wagner recognized in him. But only Germans, he thought, were capable of a true understanding of Beethoven. whether one could say that the French completely understand German music is another question, the answer to which must be doubtful. Certainly it would be wrong to maintain that the enthusiasm evoked by the Conservatoire orchestra's masterly performance of a Beethoven symphony is affected. Yet when one listens to this or that enthusiast airing the various opinions, ideas and conceits which such a symphony has suggested to him one realises at once that the German genius is still very far from being completely grasped. ( W , pp. 36-7)

The above lines already reveal a chauvinistic attitude. Eventually, thirty years later, this would lead to Wagner's embarrassing association of a pride in military conquests with the 'memory of our great BEETHOVEN' (GS IX, p. 125). One thing is sure. Wagner's Beethoven experience in 1839 compensated him for the personal humiliation of the frustration he felt as an artist in Paris.5 After his earlier confusion, he now encountered Beethoven's music as a new and astonishing phenomenon. It was also an encouraging one in a situation that was forcing him to scrape a living from musical hackwork. Thus his Paris experience marked the start of a twofold reorientation. He started thinking about Beethoven, and thereupon about German music. Beethoven became the catalyst of his own artistic qualities and aims. This is seen in such compositions as the Faust Overture and Der Fliegende Hollander, but also in his numerous literary pieces. Wagner always experienced events in a hyperactive way. At the same time as he sensed and digested their inner meaning, he would be actively carrying on, converting or delineating the experience. This again was determined by the basic pattern of his responses. In A Communication to My 40


Friends, he himself saw a connection between artistic receptiveness and the artistic urge to communicate. He made a distinction between the 'poetic' urge of the artist and the absolute urge to communicate. The one, he said, was 'only determined and shaped by the capacity for receiving vital impressions', whereas the other grew from a receptiveness which kept life's impressions at bay. This pattern of artistic reactions was developed during the years in Paris. And if Paris signified a complete reorientation for Wagner, this affected not only the composer, critic and writer on music in him, but also the conductor. It was Paris that actually produced this side of Wagner, the conductor who was to perform Beethoven's music and all but overload it with his ideas on interpretation. For the conductor as for the composer, 'poetic receptiveness' turned into the 'strength of the urge to communicate', and thereby became a stimulus to musical performance. Performing the Beethoven symphonies

Although Wagner conducted a large number of Beethoven's orchestral works, one group stands out from the others. On the whole it is the symphonies that predominate. Wagner never performed the First and Second Symphonies, which he thought were too indebted to Mozart and not independent enough (see Chapter 4). The same applies to the Fourth Symphony, which he very rarely conducted. Besides the Third, the Fifth and the Sixth, the Seventh is particularly important: it inaugurated his conducting career in Zurich. Between 1850 and 1855 he gave five performances of both the Fifth Symphony and the Seventh. The latter's importance is underlined by the influence that Wagner's interpretation had on Nietzsche, who attended the performance he conducted on 20 December 1871 in Mannheim. The Ninth's significance for Wagner is undisputed, even though he performed it only five times in all. He gave it three times in Dresden (1846, 1847 and 1849), once as part of his London conducting engagements in 1855, and finally on 22 May 1872. These rare performances had a particular emphasis, the London concert apart. 6 At the time of the Dresden concerts, Wagner was just really starting to face the artistic and social problems of his day, which he did more and more purposefully. At the time the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was laid in 1872, he was at last approaching the summit of his artistic endeavours. When Wagner arrived in Dresden he had already made greater strides as an artist than was immediately evident. Rienzi, the opera with which he made his brilliant debut at the Saxon Hoftheater and which earned him the post of court Kapellmeister, had been already superseded in an artistic sense by Der Fliegende Hollander. This was a Paris offshoot, so to speak, of the unfinished 'Faust' symphony. (Wagner's statement in a letter to Uhlig that 41


with this opera he had won through 'from all the mistiness of instrumental music to the resolution of drama' is one we should take seriously.) With his Hollander opera, the composer had already distanced himself from an aesthetic outlook with which he was again being confronted in Dresden. Reactions to the first performances were not wholly unfavourable, but they bore no comparison to the earlier enthusiasm for Rienzi. This fact, combined with a poor reception for Tannhauser and with the practical and administrative problems Wagner was facing as a conductor, must have brought it home to him that a situation akin to his situation in Paris was only just around the corner. He was feeling much the same despair as when he had composed the Faust Overture. Thus it was quite natural for him to be seized, in the end, by 'a great longing for the Ninth Symphony', and also for him to draw on Goethe's Faust in the programme he wrote for the performance on Palm Sunday, 1846. My Life reflects the strength of his renewed response to the work when he got out the score: What I did not dare to admit to myself was my knowledge of the utter lack of a solid foundation for my existence as an artist and as a member of society, headed as I was in a direction in which I could not help seeing myself without prospects and a stranger within my profession and in my daily life. My despair over this, which I tried to conceal from my friends, was now transformed by this marvellous Ninth Symphony into brightest exaltation. It is simply not possible that the heart of a pupil has ever been captivated with such rapturous force by the work of a master as mine was by the first movement of this symphony. Anyone who came upon me by surprise with the open score before me, as I went through it thinking how best it could be performed, would have been startled to hear my wild sobs and see my crying, and would no doubt have asked themselves in some amazement whether this was proper behaviour for a Royal Saxon Kapellmeister.7 (ML, pp. 329-30) Wagner was particularly struck by the first movement once again. This is also borne out by an entry in the Brown Book (p. 93): '[1846] Back in country: (last opera was Tell; lingers disagreeably; dispelled by 1st theme of 9th Symph.).' The basic mood of Beethoven's first movement, coloured afresh by depressing experiences and forebodings, Wagner now presents, however, as a battling towards 'Freude', towards joy. He describes the gulf to be bridged between the first and last movements at the end of his programmatic exegesis of the first movement: At the close of the movement this gloomy, joyless mood, swelling up to gigantic proportions, seems to encircle the universe with a view to taking possession in fearfully exalted majesty of this world that God created - for joy. (GS 11, p. 58) This joy, according to Wagner, is attained via the spiritual intermediate stages embedded in the inner movements. But here he goes further than the Paris novella and claims that resolution in favour of joy also signifies a resolution in favour of the word. For, to Wagner's mind, only the word is 42


capable of expressing this feeling clearly. Intellectually his elucidation of the whole symphony takes its cue from the finale, but from an emotional angle his starting-point is the first movement. To Wagner, the word 'joy' entitled him to invest the original musical experience with emotional values that were bound up with the wretchedness of his existence. For it was those emotions which made him feel the finale as a spiritual breakthrough and look upon the word - the word 'joy' - as the only possibility of such a breakthrough, and as its token. (Wagner's friends Uhlig and Ortlepp took a similar view of the symphony as marking a progression from despair to joy.) Wagner now regards personal experience and reflection, musical feeling and the word, the first movement and finale as parts of a whole that are meaningfully inter-related. In his programme Wagner was not only providing- as he himself said pointers towards a better understanding of the Ninth in performance. In an artistically heightened form, he was also proclaiming for his own benefit the idea of battling through. But it was vital to him that there should be an intensive communication between an interpreter and his audience. And so he wanted a further purpose of his programme to be the union of all the work's performers and listeners in 'joy', or in other words the brotherhood of men. The events of 1849 subsequently led him to combine this enthusiasm with a revolutionary fervour. The idea of joy' merged with the idea of a better, truly honourable existence. Glasenapp's point ([3/1894—1911], 11, pp.343, 538ff.) that Wagner wrote his article Revolution under the impact of the third and last Dresden performance of the Ninth Symphony is supported by the structure of this text, for it resembles the way he constructed his programme for the music. Both texts are based on the idea of a victory over unbearable, tormenting conditions. In both cases the development reaches its climax with a redemptive breakthrough to human happiness. The main difference is that in the later text, the abstract idealism of the programme's pathos has become orientated to the revolutionary ideal and transposed into the revolutionary idiom. In Goethe's Faust, problems to do with man's own nature are seen as the cause of his sufferings. But Wagner now defines his wretched state as the result of social and corporate injustice, to be overcome through the revolutionary trinity of'liberty, equality, fraternity'. Although not stated outright, this solution clearly lies behind the article's construction and choice of words. Schiller's 'Freund' and 'Briider' are now exemplified by this kind of sentence: Henceforth let there be not hatred, not envy, not disfavour and enmity amongst you; as brothers shall all of you who are now alive recognize yourselves and be free, free in your desiring, free in your actions, free in your enjoying, to recognize the value of life. (GSXII, p. 249) Wagner also uses the word 'Freude' several times. The abstract 'joy' of the 43


programme becomes a concrete social objective, which is to be grasped as human 'happiness'. The revolutionary article even includes literal echoes of Schiller's text: 'and with the heaven-shaking cry, "I am a human being1.", the millions hurtle . . . down.. .' 8 There is a variety of evidence that this association of the Ninth Symphony with revolution was in many people's minds in Dresden. Gustav Adolf Kietz wrote of the third performance on i April 1849: 'The effect of the marvellous work was positively intoxicating in these turbulent times, it's impossible to describe its impact on the audience, you need to have experienced it!' And Theodor Uhlig makes the point that Beethoven, having now 'attained his professional goal', was revealing 'his socialist awareness'. It is surely also of relevance that Michael Bakunin - Hans Mayer's 'natural revolutionary' - attended the final rehearsal (Newman says the actual concert). This was at the risk of being arrested by the police, whom he normally took good care to avoid. At the end he shouted his

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